The Dragon Factory

Chapter Ninety-Two

Grace Courtland lay naked in my arms. She was gasping as hard as I was. Our bodies were bathed in sweat. The mattress was halfway off the bed and we lay with our heads angled downward to the floor. The sheets were soaked and knotted around us. Somehow we’d lost all of my pillows and the lamp was broken, but the bulb was still lit and it threw light and shadows all over the place.

“Good God…,” she said hoarsely.

I was incapable of articulate speech.

Grace propped herself on one elbow. One side of her face was as bright as a flame from the shadeless lightbulb, the other side completely in shadow. She looked at me for a long time without speaking. I closed my eyes. Finally she bent and kissed my chest, my throat, my lips. Very softly, like a ghost.

“Joe,” she said quietly. “Joe… are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Was it terrible?”

I knew what she meant. After I’d interrogated Carteret and brought him back to the computer room, we heard more gunfire and the whump of explosions. I handcuffed Carteret, and Top, Bunny, and I rushed out to investigate. What we found was indeed terrible. The remaining staff members of the Hive had fled to the far side of the compound. A guard sergeant named Hans Brucker herded them all into a secure room, telling them all that they could seal it and that they’d be safe until Otto sent a rescue team. Once they were all inside, Brucker and two other guards had opened up with machine guns and threw in half a dozen grenades before slamming the doors. There were no survivors. No one who could talk, no one who could help us.

Brucker then shot the two other guards and put his pistol in his mouth and blew the back of his own head off.

It was insane.

It was also confusing, because Brucker was clearly the man who had led the unicorn hunt. Despite what Church had thought, it wasn’t Haeckel. When I told Church this via commlink he ordered me to scan the man’s fingerprints.

They matched Haeckel.

No one had figured that out yet.

Shortly after that the Brits arrived and we headed back to the states with what records we had, with SAM, and with Carteret. The remaining six tiger-hounds were gunned down by soldiers from the Ark Royal. The New Men were gathered up and brought aboard the carrier, but they were so terrified that several of them collapsed. One died of a heart attack. The ship’s doctor ultimately had to sedate them all, and the incident left the crew of the Ark Royal badly shaken.

Everyone else at the Hive was dead.

It had been terrible indeed.

“It was bad,” I said.

“There are so many monsters… and we keep hunting them down.” She laid her cheek against mine. “What if we can’t beat them this time?”

“We will.”

“What if we can’t? What if we fail?” Her voice was small in the semi-darkness. “What if we fall?”

“If you fall, I’ll be there to pick you up. If I fall, you’ll be there for me. That’s the way this works.”

“And if we both fall?”

“Then someone else will have to step in and step up.”

She was silent a long time. It was a pointless conversation and we both knew it. The kind of convoluted puzzle that the mind plays with in the dark, when pretenses and defenses are down. There was no one else on earth with whom Grace Courtland could ever have had this conversation. Same with me. There are some things too deep, too personal, to even share with Rudy.

I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her tight.

“One way or another, Grace,” I said, “we’ll get through it. With what we got from Carteret and the files we brought back from the Hive, Bug thinks that he’ll crack this in no time. Maybe even by morning. And then we’ll strap on the tarnished armor, take up our battered old broadswords, give a hearty ‘tallyho’ and head off to slay some dragons.”

“Monsters,” she corrected.

“Monsters,” I agreed.

We lay there on the slanting mattress, the sweat of passion cooling on our naked skin, and listened to the sound of our breathing becoming slower and slower. I reached over and pulled the plug on the lamp and we were instantly cocooned in velvety darkness. We lay like that for a long time. I thought Grace had drifted off to sleep when she whispered to me.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I turned my head toward her even though she was invisible in the darkness. “Sorry? For what?”

She didn’t answer at first. Then, “I love you, Joe.”

Before I could answer her hand found my mouth and she pressed a finger to my lips.

“Please,” she said, “please don’t say anything.”

But I did say something.

I said, “I love you, Grace.”

We said nothing else. The meaning and the price of those words were too apparent, and they filled the darkness around us and the darkness in our hearts. The battlefield is no place to fall in love. It makes you vulnerable; it tilts back your head and bares your throat. It didn’t need to be said.

I just hoped — perhaps prayed — that the monsters didn’t hear our whispered words.

Chapter Ninety-Three

Hecate and Paris lay entwined on the bed they had shared for ten years. The young black woman they had enjoyed lay between them, her chocolate skin in luxuriant contrast to the milky whiteness of theirs. The woman lay with her head on Paris’s arm, but she faced Hecate and her dark hand rested on Hecate’s flawless flat stomach.

Paris and the girl were asleep, but Hecate lay awake long into the night. Her blue eyes were open, fixed on the infinity of stars that she could see through the wide glass dome above their bed. The endless rolling of the waves on the beach outside was like the steady breathing of the slumbering world. In this moment Hecate was at peace. Her needs met, her appetites satiated, her furies calmed.

Except for one thing. Except for a small niggling item that was like a splinter in her mind.

Six hours ago she had finally let Paris talk her into inviting Alpha to the Dragon Factory. The conversation had been brief. He had sounded so happy, so flattered that they were inviting him, and he accepted their conditions without reservations because they were small: the windows of the jet would be blacked out. She teased Alpha, saying that he had taught them to always be careful and she was being careful. Alpha agreed to everything.

Too easily.

“He knows,” Hecate said to Paris after the call was ended.

“He doesn’t know,” insisted Paris. “He can’t know.”

“He knows.”

“No way. If he knew, then he’d never agree to come here, never allow himself to be that much in our power.”

“He knows.”

“No, sweetie. Alpha doesn’t know a damn thing. But he will once he gets here. I can promise you that.”

That had been the end of it. Hecate had to accept that Paris was too much of an idiot to recognize the subtle brilliance that made Alpha who and what he was. Not that she knew exactly who and what Alpha was — but she grasped the essence of their father in a way that her brother seemed incapable of managing.

“He knows,” she murmured to the infinite stars.

Yet he was coming all the same.

Chapter Ninety-Four

Eighty-two sat in the dark and looked out at the black water of the harbor. He’d never been in Baltimore before. Except for the Deck, he’d never been anywhere in the United States before. He felt strange. Lonely and scared, and alien.

Everyone here had treated him well. His nose was tended to, he was clean and dressed in new clothes: jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt with the logo of a baseball team. They even let him keep his rock. He’d been allowed to eat whatever he wanted. He’d had pizza for the first time in his life, but he wasn’t sure if he liked it. They gave him a bedroom that had a TV with cable. He was allowed to watch whatever he wanted.

But he knew that he was a prisoner. No one had used the word, but what other word was there? Before they let him go to his new room they’d taken his fingerprints and samples of hair and blood and swabs from inside his cheek. They asked him to pee in a cup. It wasn’t all that different from what the scientists at the Hive did, though these people smiled more and said “please” and “thank you.” But they weren’t really asking his permission to do their tests.

The night was long and he didn’t want to sleep. The big man who called himself Cowboy had promised that the New Men were being taken care of, but nobody explained what that meant. All Eighty-two knew was that ships from the British and American navies had converged on the island. Beyond that, he knew nothing and no one would tell him anything about what was being done to the New Men. He never saw the female again, not after Cowboy had rescued him.

Eighty-two felt more alone than he had ever been.

How strange it was, he thought, that he felt more alone, more alien, more apart, here in this place, here among the “good guys,” than he ever had before. He realized bleakly that he no longer had a place. He could not go home again even if he wanted to, which of course he did not, and he certainly didn’t belong here. He belonged nowhere.

He was no one.

The darkness stretched on forever before him.

Chapter Ninety-Five

Mr. Church sat behind his desk. He hadn’t moved at all in over half an hour. His tea was cold, his plate of cookies untouched.

On his desk were three reports, each laid out neatly side by side.

On the left was the coroner’s report on Gunnar Haeckel that included DNA, blood type, body measurements, and a fingerprint ten-card. In the middle was a brief report on Hans Brucker that included preliminary information and a fingerprint card. The blood type was a match; the basic body specifications were a match. That was fine. There were a lot of people of that basic size, build, weight, and age with O Positive blood. The troubling thing were the two fingerprint cards. They were identical. Church had ordered the prints scanned and compared again, but the results had not varied. Not even identical twins have matching fingerprints, but these were unquestionably identical.

But it was not the inexplicable match of fingerprints on the two dead men that troubled Mr. Church. For the last half hour he had barely looked at those reports. Instead all of his attention was focused on the brief note he had received from Jerry Spencer, who was now back at the DMS and ensconced in his forensics lab. The note read: “The prints taken from the boy are a perfect match for the unmarked set of prints you forwarded to me. The only difference is size. The unmarked set are larger, consistent with an adult, and there are some minor marks of use such as small scars. However, the arches, loops, and whorls match on all points. Without a doubt these prints come from the same person. There’s no chance of a mistake.”

When Mr. Church first read that note he called Spencer and confirmed it.

“I thought my note was clear enough,” said Spencer. “The prints match, end of story.”

But it was by no means the end of the story. It was another chapter in a very old and very twisted story. It painted the world in ugly shades.

Mr. Church finally moved. He selected a cookie and ate it slowly, thoughtfully, thinking about the boy called Eighty-two. The boy who had reached out to him, who had risked his life to try to save millions of people in Africa and to save the lives of the genetically engineered New Men.

Church picked up the boy’s fingerprint card and turned it over to study the photograph clipped to the other side. It had been taken during the physical examination of the boy. Church looked into the child’s eyes for long minutes, searching for the lie, for the deception, for any hint of the evil that he knew must be there.

Chapter Ninety-Six

“I think she suspects,” said Cyrus. He sipped his wine and held the Riesling in his mouth to taste its subtleties.

“About?”

“The Wave. Not that she could know anything with specific knowledge, but I think she suspects that we have some sort of global agenda.”

“Of course she suspects,” said Otto. “Wouldn’t you be disappointed in her if she didn’t?”

Cyrus nodded. It was true enough.

“But,” said Otto, “she can only be guessing. She can’t know.”

“No.”

“Not like we know.”

“No.”

“You’ll be able to see for yourself when you visit the Dragon Factory tomorrow.”

They thought about that for a while, and then they both laughed.

“Are you surprised that they invited me?” asked Cyrus.

“A little.”

“Do you think it’s a trap?”

“Of course. Our misdirection with the assassins probably only fooled Paris,” said Otto. He pursed his lips and added, “Though my guess is that this is a fishing expedition more than anything. She wants to look you in the eye when she talks about the attack. She probably believes that you’ll give something away.”

Cyrus laughed again. Otto nodded.

“She’s very smart, that one,” said Cyrus, “but I think we can both agree that she doesn’t know me as well as she thinks she does.”

“No.”

“So… a fishing expedition with a trapdoor if she doesn’t like what she sees? Is that what you think?”

“More or less. Probably not as rigid as that. Hecate likes wiggle room. If she’s not one hundred percent sure that you sent the assassins, then I expect she’ll give you some heavily edited version of a tour. Letting you see only what she thinks would appeal to you and perhaps flatter you. She’s her father’s daughter in that regard.”

“No, Otto… I think she gets that from you.”

Otto shrugged. “I believe that’s her plan.”

“And if she becomes convinced that I am responsible for the assassins? Do you think she’ll try to have me killed?”

“No,” said Otto. “Not a chance. She may torture you a bit; I think she’d be very happy to do that.”

“Let her try.”

“As you say. But ultimately I think Hecate would want you alive. She’s smart enough to know that you’re smarter. She and Paris have stolen more science then they’ve pioneered. You, Mr. Cyrus, are science. Hecate is too much your daughter to throw away such a valuable resource.”

“She’d want you dead, though,” Cyrus said.

“Without a doubt. And I would like to think that she’s too smart to risk torturing me. She learned the art from me, and she knows that turning it around is something I daresay I’ve pioneered. No… if Hecate gets the chance she’ll put a bullet in my brain.”

“If we let her,” said Cyrus.

“If we let her,” said Otto.

They smiled and clinked glasses.

They sat in lounge chairs that had been brought outside. All of the Deck’s exterior lights had been turned off, and they were miles from any town. There was nothing to mute the jeweled brilliance of the sky. They could even see the creamy flow of the Milky Way.

“Veder is on his way,” said Otto. “He’ll be here before the Twins’ jet arrives for you. Do you want him to accompany you? We can say that he’s your valet.”

“No. He can go in with the team. But once your Russians have breached the walls I want Veder to find me. I want him protecting me throughout.”

“Easy enough.”

They lapsed into a longer silence.

Several times Otto looked at Cyrus and opened his mouth to speak, but each time he left his thoughts unsaid. Finally Cyrus smiled and said, “Speak your mind before you drive me crazy. You want to know about the Hive. About how I feel?”

“Yes. We lost so much…”

“We lost nothing that matters, Otto.”

“The New Men. The breeding stock…”

“The Twins will have them somewhere. They’re smart enough to recognize what the New Men are. They would want to experiment with them. Once we take the Dragon Factory we’ll get them back. Or we’ll get enough of them back so that we can start again.”

“And Eighty-two?”

“I don’t think the Twins will have killed him. I think he’s alive. I feel it. If he’s at the Dragon Factory and unharmed, I might even show the Twins a degree of mercy.”

Otto did not need to ask what Cyrus would do — or to what extremes he would go — if Eighty-two was dead. No amount of pills would be able to control Cyrus if that happened.

But then Cyrus surprised him by saying, “But in the end it doesn’t matter.”

Otto gave him a sharp look.

“Somehow I feel like we’ve moved past that,” said Cyrus. “As we get closer to the Extinction Wave, so many of the other things are becoming less important.”

“The New Men fill a necessary role. A master race needs a slave race.”

“Maybe.”

“Those are your own words, Mr. Cyrus.”

“I know, and I believed them when I said them. But they don’t feel as valid now. We’re doing a great thing, Otto. We’re doing something that has never been done before. Within a year a billion mud people will have died. Within five years — once the second and third Waves have had a chance to reach even the remotest parts of Asia — there will only be a billion people on the planet. When we created the New Men we conceived them as a servant race during an orderly transfer of power. But… do you really think things will be orderly?”

Otto said nothing.

“I think we have lit a fuse to chaos itself. As the mud people die, the white races will not unify as a single people. You know that as well as I do. That was Hitler’s folly, because he believed that whites would naturally form alliances as the dirt races were extinguished. You and I, Otto… we’re guilty of being caught up in fervor.”

“Why this change of heart? Are you doubting our purpose?”

Cyrus laughed. “Good God, no. If anything, I have never felt my resolve and my focus — my mental focus, Otto — to be stronger. With the betrayal of the Twins I feel like blinders have been removed and a bigger, grander picture is spread out before me.”

“Are we having an incident, Mr. Cyrus? Should I get your pills?”

“No… no, nothing like that. I’m in earnest when I say that I have never been more focused.”

“Then what are you saying? I’m old, it’s late, and I’m tired, so please tell me in less grandiose terms.”

Cyrus nodded. “Fair enough.” He sipped his wine and set the glass on the cooling desert sand. “I have been reimagining the world as it will be after the Extinction Wave—Waves—have passed. There will be no reemergence of old powers. The Aryan nations will not rise. That was a propaganda that we both believed, and we’ve believed it for so long that we forgot to think it through; we forgot to allow the ancient dream to evolve even while we evolved our plans as we acquired new science. The deaths of five billion people will not bring a paradise on earth. It will not create an Aryan utopia.”

“Then what will it bring?”

“I told you. Chaos. Mass deaths will bring fear. Fear will inspire suspicion, and suspicion will become war. Our Extinction Wave is going to plunge our world into an age of total global warfare. Nations will fall; empires will collide; the entire planet will be awash in blood.”

Otto was staring at him now.

Cyrus looked up at the endless stars.

“We were born in conflict, Otto. Our species. Darwin was right about survival of the fittest. That’s what this will become. Evolution through attrition. We will light a furnace in which anything that is weak will be burned to ashes. True to our deepest dreams, Otto… only the strong shall survive. It is up to us to ensure that strength is measured by how skillfully the sword of technology is used. But make no mistake, we are about to destroy the world as we know it.” He closed his eyes. “And it will be glorious.”

Chapter Ninety-Seven

When I woke, Grace was gone. She left like a phantom early in the morning. I looked for her, but every time I found her she was busy. Too busy to talk, too busy to make eye contact that lasted longer than a microsecond. It hurt, but I understood it. Those three little words we had whispered to each other in the dark had been like fragmentation grenades tossed into our professional relationship. This morning was like the deck of the Titanic twenty minutes after the iceberg.

A pretty hefty dose of depression was settling over me as I made my way to the conference room for my seven o’clock meeting with Church and Dr. Hu.

They were both there. Church studied me for a long moment before greeting me with a wordless nod; Hu didn’t bother even looking up from his laptop. I poured a cup of coffee from a pot that smelled like it had been brewing since last month.

“Please tell me we’re ready to roll,” I said. “I feel a strong need for some recreational violence.”

“Switch to decaf,” Hu murmured distractedly.

“Have we checked out those New Men? I mean… does the Kid’s story hold water about them being Neanderthals?”

“Too soon to tell,” said Hu. “We’re running DNA tests now, but you forgot to bring me a blood sample or bring back a specimen.”

“By ‘specimen’ you better mean a urine sample,” I said, “because if you’re referring to those people as specimens I’m going to—”

“They aren’t people,” said Hu. “If they are Neanderthals, then they are not human. No, wait, before you leap over the table and kick my ass, think for a minute. You’re going to make the argument that Neanderthals evolved from Homo erectus just like we did and therefore common ancestry makes them human. Whereas I can applaud your hippie granola we’re-all-one-big-family sensibilities, the fact is that they were distinctly different from modern humans. They may not have even interbred with early humans, and our last common ancestor died out about six hundred and sixty thousand years ago. Besides, the Kid was wrong when he said that they were reclaimed from mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrion only has a little over sixteen thousand DNA letters that code for thirteen proteins. To reclaim and grow an extinct species you’d need DNA from the nucleus, which has three billion letters that produce more than twenty thousand proteins.”

“Who the fuck cares?” I yelled. “They’re people. They talk; they think; they look like people…”

“I don’t know what they are, Ledger, but they’re still scientific oddities. Not people.”

“Enough,” said Church quietly. He looked at me. “The New Men will be transported to a U.S. military facility in Central America.”

“You mean an internment camp?”

“No. They will receive medical attention and assessment to determine how we can best integrate them into society, if they can be integrated into society, and with the heavy conditioning and genetic manipulation they’ve undergone we may have to face the reality that they cannot be successfully integrated into our culture.”

“So what will happen to them?”

“Ultimately? I don’t know. I’ve made a strong case on their behalf to the President, and he agrees that this needs to be handled with the utmost care and the greatest concern for their well-being and their rights.”

“Rights?” asked Hu. “What rights?”

Church turned to face him and Hu withered under the cold, hard stare. “The President agrees with me that they are to be treated as liberated prisoners of war. Their basic human rights will be addressed first, and at some later point wiser people than us will determine how best to serve their needs.” He paused. “Terrible things have been done to these people, and in many ways this is as great a human rights atrocity as the death camps.”

“Sure,” said Hu. “Fine. Whatever.” He went back to work on his laptop, and I drank my coffee and poured another cup.

Hu brightened. “Okay, maybe I got something…”

“Got what?” I asked. “A conscience?”

Church interrupted, “We’ve had a busy night collating the information from the Hive. We still haven’t pinned down the location of the Deck, but Bug thinks that will happen this morning. First Sergeant Sims is already prepping Echo and Alpha teams for a full-out assault. If the facility is in Arizona, then we can get ground support from the L.A. office. Unfortunately, Zebra and X-ray teams are still in Canada. If this morning goes well for them, then they’ll close out that matter and we can put them on the ground.”

“What about the teams from the Hangar?” The Brooklyn facility had four field teams. Baltimore and L.A. had two each, Denver and Chicago had one. I knew that the Chicago team had been chopped down in a mission two weeks ago that had killed the team leader and four of the six operators. They were vetting new candidates from Delta and the SEALs.

“Tango and Leopard are overseas. Hardball is in the process of moving to Denver to replace Jigsaw. They’re on standby.”

Unlike traditional branches of the military the DMS didn’t use the standard A, B, C code names for all of the teams. They did originally, but as teams were wiped out they were replaced by teams with new names that started with the same letter. If Grace and I ever came up for air we were supposed to start building new B and C teams to replace the original Bravo and Charlie Teams massacred during a major terrorist action in late June.

“We’ll also have National Guard support and if necessary a squadron from the Three Hundred and Fifty-fifth Fighter Wing out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson.” He measured out a half smile. “We’re taking this very seriously, Captain. I had a long talk with the President last night and again this morning. He’s put enough assets and resources at our disposal to wage a war.”

“That’s what this is,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s definitely what this is.”

“Where do we stand with intelligence?”

“Sit and I’ll go over it. The full intelligence packet is being downloaded to your PDA, but here are the talking points, and there are some real speed bumps.” He tapped a key and the LCD screen behind him showed a picture of the man the boy SAM had identified as Hans Brucker.

“This is Gunnar Haeckel,” said Church. He tapped another key and a second photo appeared. It was a scan of an employee ID photograph. “This is Hans Brucker.” He hit some keys and two fingerprint ten-cards appeared, one beneath each photo. “Here are their prints. Now watch.” He tapped keys and the cards moved together and the computer program corrected the angles of each so that they overlapped. Brief lights flashed every time a loop or whorl aligned. It was like looking at a string of firecrackers. One by one each separate fingerprint image flashed white to indicate that a complete comparison was finished. All ten prints were perfect matches.

“Yeah, you told me that there was a screwup. Someone’s screwing with the fingerprint index.”

“No,” said Church. “These are the correct prints from each man.”

Hu looked up finally, grinning. “We’re also running a high-speed DNA profile on Brucker. Guess what?”

“You look too pleased with yourself, Doc. This isn’t going to be good news, is it?”

“It’s about the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while,” Hu said. “What we got here is a new chapter in the second Star Wars movie.”

“Huh?”

“Second Star Wars movie. After Phantom Menace, before Revenge of the Sith.”

It took me a moment to fish through the raw geek data in my brain.

“Oh shit,” I said.

“Yep,” said Hu, grinning fit to bust. “Attack of the Clones!”

“Oh… come on…”

“Sadly,” said Church, “Dr. Hu is correct.” I noticed a little twitch in his voice when he said “Dr.”

“Well,” I said, “we already have unicorns and tiger-hounds. Why not clones?”

Hu looked a little deflated, as if he expected a bigger reaction from me. Truth was that I’d toyed with that concept on the flight back from Costa Rica, after learning that the fingerprints matched. I’d dismissed it mostly because I didn’t want to believe it.

“We have any aliens or crashed UFOs?” I asked.

“Not at the moment,” Church said dryly.

“Okay, then what about the Extinction Wave? What do we know about that?”

“That’s the real problem,” said Church. “Doctor?”

Hu said, “It looks like our mad scientists have been trying to take diseases that are normally genetic — meaning passed down through bloodlines—”

“I know what ‘genetic’ means,” I said.

He sniffed. “They’ve been trying to take genetic diseases and turn them into viruses. It’s wacky and way out on the cutting edge. Essentially they’re rebuilding the DNA of certain viruses to include the genes that code for Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell, Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, certain types of cancer… that sort of thing.”

“So this is the Cabal,” I said. “This was what they were working on during the Cold War days.”

“Definitely the same agenda,” said Church, “and some of the same players.”

“The difference,” Hu said, “is now they can actually do this stuff. They’ve cracked the process for turning genetic diseases into communicable pathogens.”

“And the Extinction Wave is going to be a coordinated release of these pathogens?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Church.

“How the hell do we stop them?”

“That’s what you’re going to find out for us when you raid the Deck. We have a glimmer of hope—”

“Not much of a glimmer,” Hu cut in, but Church ignored him.

“—in that we found several matching lists of the countries and regions where the pathogens will be released.”

“That’s great! We can warn—”

“I’ve also been on the phone with the State Department. Embassies in each country have already been put on standby. There’s an issue of delicacy here,” Church said. “We have to keep our awareness of this under the radar until we’ve taken down the Deck and the people responsible. We can’t risk a leak that might lead to this new Cabal going dark and starting up again at a later date and in new locations.”

I nodded.

“From everything we’ve read,” Hu said, “there’s a specific release code that needs to be sent out. Your dancing partner, Carteret, said that the release code was programmed into a trigger device that is always kept by either Otto Wirths or Cyrus Jakoby. He said he thinks it’s a small device about the size of a flash drive but with a six-digit keypad on it.”

“He didn’t say any of that to me,” I said.

Church adjusted his glasses. “He told me,” he said. “He was quite willing to unburden his soul.”

“What did you do to him?”

Church ate a cookie and didn’t answer.

Hu said, “So we have to get to Wirths or Jakoby and get that trigger device before the code is sent to agents around the world who would then release the pathogens.”

“Only that? Swell, I’ll see if I can work it into my day,” I said sourly. I reached over and took a cookie from Church’s plate. “We’re going to have to go in quietly. Otherwise, they’ll just trigger the device at the first sign of an invasion. Quiet infils take time to set up, and I can hear that frigging clock ticking.”

“I have an idea about that,” said Hu. “This trigger device probably is a flash drive. A device of the kind Carteret described isn’t big enough to have a satellite uplink. It probably doesn’t have any kind of transmitter. I asked Bug about this. He agrees that the trigger device probably needs to be plugged into a USB port and then the code sent out via the Internet. It’s the smartest way to do it, and it would allow for individual codes for each launch.”

“Okay, so what’s the plan?”

“An EMP,” he said. “Right before you rush the place, or maybe after you’re inside, but before you start going all Jack Bauer on everyone, we pop an E-bomb on them.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“An electromagnetic bomb,” he said. “Very cool stuff. It’s a bomb that creates an electromagnetic pulse. It won’t kill people, but the EMP fries anything electrical and should wipe out their computer systems. Unless they’re ruggedized… but that’s a risk.”

“We have this stuff?”

“The Navy was playing with them during the first Gulf War,” said Church. “And we used one to take out Iraqi TV during the 2003 invasion. If we can locate the deck I can arrange to have an E-bomb dropped.”

“Friend in the industry?” I asked.

“Friend in the industry,” he agreed.

“Then that’s our edge,” I said. I stood up and reached across the table to Hu. “Nice work, Doc.”

He looked at my hand as if I was offering to beat him to death with it. After a few seconds’ hesitation he took my hand and shook it.

“What about the Jakoby family?” I asked. “The Twins. SAM said that they were involved. He told me that they were the ones who genetically engineered the unicorn for the hunt and they treat Cyrus as if he’s their prisoner rather than their father. SAM doesn’t know them that well, but he said that they have a lab somewhere and that Cyrus has been trying to find it for years. The Twins call their lab the Dragon Factory.”

“Wonder if they’ve engineered a dragon?” Hu mused.

“There was nothing in the recovered records that gives any indication of the location of the Dragon Factory,” Church said. “And MindReader has not been able to pin down a recent location for either Paris or Hecate Jakoby. They were last seen at an art show in London a week ago. We have nine of their known residences under surveillance by police in four countries. At this moment, beyond providing animals for the hunts we don’t know the scale or depth of their involvement. We’re poised to seize all of their known holdings and assets, however, but that move won’t be made until we’re sure it won’t interfere with our attempts to find that trigger device.”

“And their dad?”

“There are no photos of Cyrus Jakoby anywhere. No personal details of any kind other than when the Twins mentioned him in passing during press interviews. If he’s being kept as a prisoner, then it might explain why he’s so conspicuously off the radar. There was a sensational news story about the birth of the Twins, but none of the papers carried photos of the father.”

“Sounds like he doesn’t want his face publicly known,” I said. “That squares with the assumption that ‘Jakoby’ is not his real name. Could be anything from a drug lord on the lam to someone in witness protection.”

“It covers too much ground for easy speculation. Bottom line is that we don’t know who he is, and it is remarkable that MindReader cannot dig up a single piece of verification on him.”

“If he’s tied to the Cabal, could someone have used that old system—”

“Pangaea,” he supplied.

“—to erase records of him?”

“Yes. And considering the connections to the Cabal that already exist in this case I think that’s what has happened.”

“How about Otto Wirths?”

“Same thing. Nothing. The names are probably aliases. However, there is another possible tie to the death camps. Eduard Wirths, the senior medical officer at Auschwitz, was nicknamed ‘Otto’ as a child. Some of his close adult friends still called him that, though in all the official records he went by Eduard.”

“So, you’re thinking that Otto is what? Son, grandson? Named after Eduard’s nickname?”

“It’s worth considering.”

Hu said, “Or he could be a clone of Eduard Wirths. Hey, don’t look at me like that, Ledger. If we’re playing with clones, then we have to factor them into all of this. And it’s been thought of before. You know, The Boys from Brazil. Ira Levin book. Movie with Gregory Peck—”

“They were cloning Hitler.”

“Why not? Maybe someone’s cloning the whole upper echelon of the Nazi Party. Or a whole army of Hitlers!”

“Don’t even joke,” I said.

“Okay, but if we run into an army of short guys with toothbrush mustaches and undescended testicles don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I shook my head and turned to Church. “How’s the Kid?”

Church did not answer right away. “We’re doing some additional testing.”

“I want him to go with me when we raid the Deck.”

“Why?”

“He used to live there. We don’t have time to learn the layout and intricacies on our own. I don’t like taking a kid into a combat situation, God knows, but we’re short on advantages.”

Church nodded. “We can wire you with a camera and have the boy online with you from the TOC. But he doesn’t go into the field.” He paused. “I don’t entirely trust the boy,” he said.

“Why the hell not? If it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be anywhere with this.”

“I’m sensible of the debt we — and the world — owe him. But his connection to the key players behind this makes me uneasy. We can discuss it more later. Dr. Sanchez is with him at the moment.”

“Rudy’s back?”

“Yes. He flew in early this morning at my request. He’s been with the boy for several hours now. I’d like to hear his assessment on the boy before I—”

The door burst open and Bug rushed in. He was grinning from ear to ear. Grace was a half step behind him. She shot me a quick, excited look, but it had nothing to do with last night.

“We have the buggers,” she said. “Captain Smythe from the Ark Royal just called. There was a small plane in a hangar at the Hive. One of Smythe’s pilots searched the plane and checked the controls and mileage, gas usage — the lot.”

Bug said, “I matched the mileage log against traffic control records, using Arizona as a probable location. I think we found the Deck. It’s definitely Arizona. A nowhere spot near Gila Bend, just over the border from Mexico.”

“Never heard of it,” said Hu. “Are you sure?”

Bug slapped a satellite printout onto the table. It showed a small cluster of buildings in the middle of a desert landscape. Smack dab in the center was a structure with twelve sides.

“Son of a bitch,” Hu said.

I clapped Bug on the shoulder. “Outstanding!”

Church said as he got to his feet, “Captain Ledger, Major Court-land… get your teams ready to roll. Alert all stations. I’ll get on the horn and find us an E-bomb.” His face was hard and colder than I’d ever seen it. “We’re going to war.”

Chapter Ninety-Eight

I was alone in a world of heat shimmers, scorpions, biting flies, and nothing else. The Sonoran Desert may not be the Sahara, but it has its moments. The temperature at one o’clock in the afternoon was 122 degrees, and there was not so much as a wisp of cloud between its furnace heat and me except camouflaged BDUs and a thin film of sunscreen. Bunny and Top were in the air-conditioned back of an FBI van that was painted to look like a Comcast Cable TV truck out on a dirt road that led from nowhere to nowhere. Grace and Alpha Team were somewhere in a Black Hawk helicopter on a mesa fifteen miles to the northwest. Somewhere up in the wild blue yonder was the 358th Fighter Squadron, ready to rain hell and damnation down on the Deck if I gave the word. One of those planes carried an E-bomb. The upside was that we could get one; the downside was that my own electronics might not survive it. The ruggedized unit I had in my pack was supposed to be able to withstand the EMP, but as has been pointed out to me so many times since joining the G, it was a piece of equipment built by the lowest bidder.

A westerly breeze did nothing but push hot air past barrel cactus, water-starved junipers, jimson weed, and tumbleweed. I shimmied through the hard pan to the lip of a ridge that looked down on a small cluster of buildings nestled in a shallow basin between two nondescript ranges of small mountains. According to the Pima County Assessor’s Office, the buildings were commercially zoned for “scientific research and development.” The IRS told Bug that all appropriate taxes had been paid by Natural White, a company doing research on a cure for “vitiligo,” a pigmentation disorder in which melanocytes — the cells that make pigment — in the skin are destroyed. As a result, white patches appear on the skin in different parts of the body.

Very cute. I guess even psychopathic white supremacist assholes can have a sense of humor.

There were several names on the IRS and deed forms, and so far they all checked out as citizens of the United States with no criminal records. With an organization as large as the Cabal, there was probably no shortage of members willing to lend their name to a dummy corporation.

Bug and his team were working on locating all assets and accounts tied to Natural White so they could be frozen when we made our move. Sometimes you do more to cripple the beast by picking its pocket than putting a bullet in it.

I shielded my PDA from the sun and studied the satellite image of the facility. The central building was, as SAM had said, shaped like a dodecahedron. There was a long, flat road to the east of the building that didn’t seem to go anywhere but was just about the right width and length to serve as a decent airstrip.

I tapped my earbud.

“Cowboy to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon.”

“I’m in position. Ask the Kid if they use the eastern road as a landing strip.”

“He says yes. The Twins use it for their Lear and he’s seen other small craft land there. He says there is a hidden hangar as well. We’re sending you thermal scans. They’re enlightening.”

My PDA flashed with a new image that showed thermal scans of the basin. The Deck was the hot center point, but there were radiating lines of heat going out in all directions to form a pattern that had nothing to do with what the naked eye could see. One long corridor ran half a mile from the center of the Deck to another hot spot that was nearly as big.

“Ninety percent of this place is underground,” I said.

“Yes.”

He didn’t say anything and I knew that he was giving me a chance to change the mission, to back out or ask for backup. But I didn’t want to do that, because we could not risk tipping our hand too soon.

“Wish me luck,” I said with as much jauntiness as my nerves could afford. “Keep the Kid handy.”

“I’m here, Cowboy,” SAM said.

“Roger that. I’m proceeding inside.”

I took a small high-power camera and clipped it to my topmost buttonhole. I wasn’t wearing full combat rig, no tin pot with a helmet cam. The lapel cam was one of Bug’s toys, and it fed images to a satellite that relayed them to the TOC. With that in place, I crept down the side of the basin in an uneven rhythm. If a tumbleweed moved, I moved. When the wind died and everything stood still, so did I. SAM said that he didn’t think that there were any motion detectors, but there were cameras. He’d written out a timetable that was impressive bordering on obsessive-compulsive. When I’d commented on the precision, SAM shrugged and said that he had a lot of time to himself, then, after a long contemplative pause, added, “Besides… the only way to really be alone in that place is to become invisible, and that means staying out of the camera cycle.”

He blushed when he said it, realizing that it sounded weird. Actually, I thought it sounded very sad.

It took forty minutes to make my way to the first camera.

SAM’s voice guided me through the security maze.

“The first camera’s in the dead cottonwood tree twenty yards ahead and to your right,” he said. He and Church were watching my progress via the clip-on camera and a real-time satellite. “Wait for it to swing past, then run. Go straight to the red rocks and stop. Great! Now the next camera is on that pole coming up out of the ground right ahead. It does a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sweep, so once it moves you can follow it almost all the way around. There’s an old wooden picket fence. See it? Drop down behind that and count to fifty, then get up and run to the first building.”

I followed every step, moving, stopping, dropping, running, and made it to the building.

“The doors need swipe cards,” he said.

“No problem, Kid.” I crouched by the door and fished out the first of a bunch of gizmos Dr. Hu and Bug had given me. The unit was the size and shape of a pack of stick gum. I peeled off a plastic strip to expose the adhesive and pressed it gently onto the key-swipe mechanism. Adhesive was safer than magnets in case the unit had a magnetic detector. Downside was that they weren’t recoverable, so there was a timer inside that would release a tiny vial of acid in an hour — just enough to fry all of the internal works — the chemical reaction would also neutralize the adhesive and the thing would fall off.

Once the unit was secure, I tapped in a code and waited. The unit was remote linked to MindReader; it raced through possible code combinations while MindReader’s stealth software instantly erased all traces. It was designed for keycard systems that trigger alarms if the wrong card or a failed card is used too many times.

“Got it,” I heard Bug say over the commlink.

“Copy that,” I whispered, and removed a master keycard that had now received from MindReader the proper code. I swiped it and all the little lights above the lock flashed a comforting green. I opened the door and stepped inside, staying low per SAM’s instructions.

“I’m in a tractor shed,” I said. “No visible doors other than the one I came in and the big garage door.”

“There are four operational modes for the Deck,” said SAM in way that sounded like he was reciting back a training orientation speech. “The Daily Mode maintains a security-neutral appearance for all exterior buildings, but there are a lot of extra security steps to keep unwanted guests out. All secure entrances to the Deck are closed. There’s a Work Mode, which leaves only crucial doors locked, but there would be guards everywhere. Then there’s a Visitor Mode, which is what they do when the Twins come — it hides stuff inside as well as out. And last is the Defense Mode. I’ve never seen that.”

“Let’s hope we don’t. What’s next?”

“Do you see the droplight on the other side of the tractor?”

“Roger. It’s turned off.”

“The security camera is mounted on the ceiling in the left-hand corner. It has a motion sensor, but if you crawl under the tractor and come up on the other side it won’t trip.”

“I feel like I’m in a video game.”

“Yeah, but there’s no reset button,” said SAM. A sober warning that I took to heart as I slithered under the tractor and crawled out on the far side.

“Reach for the droplight. Press the off button twice. It opens a wall panel with a second keycard. The same key code will open this and the next two doors. Don’t try it on the door marked with a white circle.”

I did as he instructed and a wall calendar from a tractor company slid up to reveal a recessed space with another keycard. Cute. My master keycard tripped it and a door-sized section of wall slid noiselessly aside to reveal a sophisticated steel security door. I key-coded it and stepped into a large metal cubicle with another security door. There was a line of pegs on the left side on which hung lab coats in various colors.

“The picture’s fuzzy, I can’t see you,” SAM said. “Where are you?”

“Between two security doors.”

“Are there jackets on the wall?”

“Lab coats, yes.”

“Put on an orange one. That’s for the computer maintenance staff. There’s like a million of them, and they can go almost anywhere as long as they have the right keycards. No one will look twice at you.”

“Works for me.”

I slipped into an orange lab coat, but there was nothing I could do about my camo fatigue pants. I clipped the minicamera to the jacket and hoped no one would notice it. If you didn’t peer too close at it, the thing looked like a slightly oversized button.

I passed through the next security door and walked a long hallway that fed off into rooms marked: KITCHEN, LAUNDRY, DRY GOODS, and a few others. None of these doors had keycard locks, but there were security cameras mounted at both ends of the hallway. No way to bypass them, but SAM said that it was all about what color lab coat you wore. As I walked, I peeled the adhesive off of another of the code-reader doohickeys, and when I reached the door I surreptitiously pressed it in place.

I faked a sneezing fit and made a show of patting my pockets for a tissue. I pretended to wipe my nose on my sleeve and Bug said, “You’re good to go.”

I removed the newly recoded master keycard and opened the door.

No problems.

I was inside the Deck now.

“The image feed is back,” said SAM. “You’re right near a big hallway that runs the length of the upper level. The staff calls it Main Street.”

The doorway led to a wide central corridor that was packed with people wearing a rainbow assortment of lab coats and coveralls. Most people ignored me. No one cared about my pants or boots: I saw everything from sandals, to sneakers, to high heels. Several people in orange lab coats passed by and they were the only ones who appeared to notice me, but they gave me nods and went about their business.

Then SAM walked right past me.

I was so surprised I began to say something to him, but I immediately clamped my mouth shut. This boy was at least a year older than SAM. He looked just like him, though. Same gap in his front teeth, same soft chin and dark eyes. I tried to turn the camera his way, but there were too many people.

When the boy was gone I discreetly tapped my earbud. “Hey, SAM… I think I just saw your brother.”

“I don’t have a—,” SAM began to say when suddenly there were three long, harsh bleats from an alarm system. Everyone froze in place.

I began to slip under my lab coat for my gun, but then a hugely amplified voice blared from speakers mounted in the ceiling, “The Deck is going into Visitor Mode. Please prepare to receive visitors.”

It repeated several times and suddenly everyone was in motion. Wall panels shifted to close off whole wings of the building; scores of staff members filed through hidden doorways that closed behind them so seamlessly it was as if the people had vanished from this reality. The blaring message repeated and repeated.

Then Church’s voice was in my ear: “Cowboy… there is a small commercial jet inbound to your location.”

“I know,” I said. “We’re about to have visitors.”

Chapter Ninety-Nine

Hecate and Paris were all smiles as they stepped down from their jet. Cyrus and Otto were dressed in suits that were ten years out of style, and a stack of suitcases was piled on an electric cart. A tall, austere man in a modern suit stood next to them.

“Alpha!” cried Hecate, and ran to her father. Instead of bowing, she hugged him and buried her face in the side of his neck. Cyrus was momentarily nonplussed, but after a hesitation he hugged his daughter. “Alpha… Daddy…,” she murmured.

Cyrus looked wide-eyed at Paris, who adjusted his own expression from a glad smile to one of concern. “Alpha… ever since we were attacked Hecate’s been very upset. So have I, as a matter of fact. If the government is sending black ops teams against us then we’re out of our depth. We—”

Hecate cut him off. She had tears in her blue eyes. “We need you. Daddy… we need you.”

“I—” Cyrus looked truly at a loss.

“She’s right, Alpha,” said Paris, stepping close so he could pat Hecate’s back. “We’re afraid of losing everything. We’re… well… we just don’t know what to do. I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you’re willing to come to the Dragon Factory. We need to know how to make it more secure, and if we have to abandon it… then we need your advice on how to preserve our research.”

Hecate leaned back from the embrace, staring deep into her father’s eyes. “If we have to… if you don’t think we’re safe there… can we transfer our data to your computers here? We have to keep it safe.”

“We have to keep it in the family,” said Paris.

Cyrus looked at Otto, who raised a single eyebrow. The tall man with him wore no expression at all.

“Why… certainly,” said Cyrus, though his voice was anything but certain.

Hecate threw herself back into Cyrus’s arms and wept with obvious relief. Paris closed his eyes as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders.

“Thank you,” he murmured. “Alpha… Father… thank you.”

Eventually they climbed aboard the jet.

Otto Wirths and the other man lingered for a moment before following them.

“Those are his children?” the man asked, a note of skepticism in his voice. “Those are the Twins?”

“Yes,” said Otto.

“They’re more effusive than I expected.”

“Aren’t they.”

“Mr. Jakoby brought me all the way out here because of them?”

Otto wore a smile that did not reach as far as his eyes. “We are being played, Mr. Veder.”

Conrad Veder smiled thinly. “No kidding.”

They climbed aboard. Once the jet was refueled, it taxied in a circle and took off for the Dragon Factory.

Chapter One Hundred

“The Deck is in Work Mode,” said the voice from the speakers. “All duty personnel return to assigned tasks.”

There was a pause and then, “Supervisor protocols are in place.”

The doors and hidden panels shifted again and the multicolored swarms of people emerged. I found a men’s room and ducked inside. Once I made sure I was alone I said, “What was that all about?”

Church said, “A Learjet owned by White Owl, a dummy company that MindReader traced back to Paris Jakoby, just landed and picked up three passengers. From the satellite image SAM thinks that the passengers were Otto Wirths and Cyrus Jakoby. We didn’t get a good angle on the third man.”

“Swell. Looks like I came to the wrong party.”

“Amazing and Alpha Team are in follow-craft. They’ll assess and take the next steps to find the device.”

“What about me?”

“Your call. If the Jakobys are heading to the Dragon Factory, then Amazing will infil and attempt to secure the device. Once she succeeds, the fist of God in the form of three DMS teams and National Guard units will pound the Deck.”

It was a crappy set of choices. If I left I still wouldn’t catch up to Grace before she caught up to the Jakobys. If I stayed here I might learn something, but I might also get caught.

“Keep SAM on the line and give me a quick tour. I’ll see what I can see, and then I want to collect Echo and follow Alpha to the frat party.”

“Roger that.”

Chapter One Hundred One

Maj. Grace Courtland sat hunched over her laptop watching a white dot move across the satellite image of the southern United States. The dot kept just inside U.S. airspace, cruising fifty miles north of the Mexican border as it crossed Arizona and New Mexico; then it cut across the Texas midlands and out over the Gulf of Mexico south of Houston.

She tapped her commlink. “Bug, have you gotten through to the FAA yet?”

“Just finishing with them now. The jet filed a flight plan for Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. The FAA have records of the same jet making the run twice monthly for the last few years.”

“That’s it, then. Brilliant, Bug.”

Grace sat back and closed her eyes. It was going to be a couple of hours yet until touchdown, and there was nothing much she could do until then. She’d eavesdropped on the command channel while Joe infiltrated the Deck, and her heart had been in her throat the whole time. Partly because of the oppressively huge stakes they were playing for and partly for Joe.

Joe.

Early this morning, after making love, she had told him that she loved him. She’d said the words that she swore that she would never say to anyone as long as she wore a uniform. It was stupid, it was wrong, and it was dangerous.

Later that morning she hadn’t said a word to him. She was too embarrassed and too frightened of the damage their pillow talk might reveal in the light of day. And then, of course, everything started happening.

Grace wished she could roll back the clock to this morning so she could take back those words. Or, failing that, to have had the courage to stay all night and talk with him later that morning. Instead she had fled — the one act of cowardice in a life filled with risk taking.

That morning, when she’d said those words, Joe should have given her the pat lecture on the dangers of getting too close to a fellow combatant. It was never smart and it usually worked out to heartbreak of one kind or another, and that included the very real possibility of getting drummed out of the DMS and shipped back to England with a career-ending reprimand in her jacket. She’d never work in covert ops again, not unless she wanted to gallop into battle behind a desk.

She felt sick and stupid for saying those words.

What made it worse… so very much worse, was that Joe had said them back.

I love you, Grace.

She could hear the echo of those words as if Joe was whispering them into her ear as her pursuit craft tore through the skies.

I love you, Grace.

“God,” she said, and Redman — her second in command — glanced up.

“Major…?”

She shook her head and closed her eyes again.

Chapter One Hundred Two

I moved through the Deck quickly but casually. I found a clipboard on an unoccupied desk and took it. Every time I saw someone who looked vaguely official I studied the clipboard and mumbled meaningless computer words to myself. Bug must have heard me, because I heard him chuckling in my ear.

SAM steered me through the common areas toward the research centers. His knowledge of the Deck ended there, but that was fine. I wasn’t going to stick around very long. The Deck was multileveled and I took a combination of escalators, stairs, and moving walkways to get around. A couple of times I thought I saw SAM again — or the kid who looked like him — but each time there were other people around and I couldn’t risk trying to make contact. It was another mystery to be solved later.

I reached a level that was marked: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, which I thought was kind of funny since this was the secret lab of a maniac out to destroy the world. But I guess there’s bureaucracy everywhere.

I used another of Bug’s sensors to reset my master keycard and then slipped inside the restricted area. Just inside was a glass-enclosed metal walkway that ran along all four sides of a huge room in which sat rows of big tanks in massive hydraulic cradles that rocked them back and forth. The tanks had glass domes with blue lights that filled the room with an eerie glow. There were at least thirty of the tanks connected to computers on the floor and a network of pipes and cables above. I leaned close to the glass and looked down to see a half-dozen technicians in hazmat suits adjusting dials, working at computer stations, or taking readings. There were huge biohazard warning signs everywhere.

“Are you seeing this?” I whispered.

Church said, “Yes.” He didn’t sound happy. “Walk around and see if you can get a better angle on the tanks.”

I moved along, pretending to make notes on my clipboard, until I found a spot that offered the best view of the closest tank.

“Whoa!” It was Dr. Hu and for once he seemed disturbed rather than jazzed by something science related.

“What am I looking at?”

“Something that I’ve only ever heard talked about but never expected to see,” he said. “This setup is like a gigantic version of a vaccine bioreactor. But the scale!”

“Bioreactor?”

“It’s a device in which cell culture medium and cells are placed in a sterile synthetic membrane called a Cellbag, which is then rocked back and forth. The rocking motion induces waves in the cell culture fluid and provides mixing and oxygen transfer. The result is a perfect environment for cell growth. I mean, GE was making these back in the mid-nineties but for a max of like five hundred liters. Those things are the size of… they must be able to hold…”

“ ‘Five thousand gallons,’ ” I said, reading it off of the side of the vat.

“Jesus…”

“I kind of doubt they’re making vaccines down here,” I said. “Could this be how they’re mass-producing the pathogens?”

“It… could,” Hu said hesitantly, “but if so, whoever designed this is heading off into some new areas of production science. That’s some scary shit right there.”

“Believe me when I tell you, Doc, I’m shaking in my boots.”

“Captain Ledger,” said Church, “get out of there. We have enough proof to shut this place down once we secure that trigger device. Get out of the building and rendezvous with Echo Team.”

“I want Echo Team to provide backup for Alpha when they hit the Dragon Factory.”

“That depends on timing. Alpha may not be able to wait until you arrive.”

“Copy that. I’m out of here.”

I wanted to run, but I had to play my role. I slowly made my way to the exit but then turned and looked back through the glass at the rows of slowly rocking tanks. At the absolute proof that evil existed in the world. Not as a concept, not as an abstraction, but as an irrefutable reality. Right here, brewing in those tanks. And I knew that if the Extinction Wave was set to hit in two days, then the pathogens for that were already gone, already distributed to Africa and God knows where else.

This… this was more of it. More evil, more danger brewing in a very real sense. Who was next? Who else were these madmen planning to kill? Was it to be all races except for some select few?

God, the rage that burned through my veins was unbearable.

How do you reconcile yourself to a world in which monsters like Cyrus Jakoby can exist? I stared at the handiwork of this man and struggled to grasp the enormity of what he’d done and the horror of what he was on the verge of doing. This man was willing to kill millions — tens of millions — to infect whole populations, to try to eradicate entire races.

How do you fight something like that? Hitler is seventy years in his grave and still the pollution of his dreams taints our modern world. What drives a man like Cyrus Jakoby to keep such an inhuman program going? The technology in this room spoke of enormous intelligence, imagination, and drive. He broke through barriers in genetics, virology, bio-production… aspects of science that could have benefited mankind, and why? To destroy? To exterminate people as if they were lice.

Hate. Now that’s something I understand. At that moment, standing on the catwalk above the rows of bioreactors, I was filled with a degree of hate that took me beyond heat and into a strange cold space. I turned away and headed for the door. I needed to get out of here and into the air. I needed to be there when the DMS took Jakoby and the rest of the Cabal down, and if it was within my power I was going to see that it was taken down for good this time. Taken down, torn to pieces, and the bits scattered to the winds.

As I walked the halls and climbed the stairs I thought about what we would do if we caught Jakoby alive. How do you punish such as person? A bullet seems so simple. Too easy. A bullet and he dies; he’s gone.

Torture?

Man, that was a can of worms. My personal politics are left of center, but I have my hardline moments. A guy like Jakoby, a man willing to slaughter every nonwhite in Africa… I hate to know this about myself, but I know that if I was alone in a room with that bastard I don’t think I’d be Mr. Passive. If I could make it last for a year, keeping him in screaming agony, would that offer an adequate redress? When the crime is so vast that it spans decades of time, crosses all national lines, changes cultures, and devours the weak and strong alike, then what possible form of punishment could be appropriate? Where is justice in the face of true unalterable evil?

I could use his records, his confession, to launch a holy war against those who embrace the ideas of eugenics, ethnic cleansing, and the master race. I could light that fire — but what chance was there that the resulting firestorm would burn only the guilty? War is madness, and when bullets fly and bombs explode many people use the conflagration to settle personal agendas, or profiteer, or simply play blood games.

No… I could not do that.

But I had a better plan. It would bring neither peace nor closure to the victims of Cyrus Jakoby, but it would do something no bullet or hangman’s noose could do. It would hurt him.

With those dark thoughts burning in my brain, I made my way carefully out of the Deck, crossed the obstacle course of cameras, and then ran the rest of the way back to where Top and Bunny were waiting.

“The Brits are landing,” Top said.

Chapter One Hundred Three

In Florida, Alpha Team had transferred to a Navy helicopter that was now sitting on the beach of a deserted cay fifteen nautical miles from Dogfish Cay. They were waiting for pickup from the USS New Mexico, a Virginia Class submarine that was patrolling these waters. Her team waited in the forward cabin of a large fishing boat owned by the DEA. The captain, an agent two years from retirement, got a “no questions asked” call from his boss and was happy to oblige. All he had to do was sit at anchor and pretend to fish.

“Tell me,” Church said. He was at the TOC and had spent an hour on the phone with the President. Church sounded uncharacteristically tired.

“The Jakoby jet landed on Grand Bahama and they transferred to a seaplane which they flew to Dogfish Cay. There’s a dredged harbor and good deep water. The New Mexico will bring us to within a mile and we’ll go in by water at zero dark thirty.”

“Good. Captain Ledger and Echo Team will be in the water about ninety minutes behind you. Do you want to wait for him?”

“There’s no time. He did his part at the Hive and in Arizona. I’d like to tear off a piece of this for myself.”

“Be careful, Grace,” Church said. “Joe had insider information; you don’t.”

Grace was startled by Church’s use of her first name. He rarely did that and she found it both touching and mildly unnerving.

“I’ll be careful. And I’ll get that sodding trigger device if I have to cut off Cyrus Jakoby’s head to do it.”

“I’m okay with that scenario,” said Church, and disconnected.

She went up on deck and then around to the wheelhouse where the captain was sitting with his feet up and a cold bottle of Coke resting on his stomach. He gestured to the cooler and she fished one out and sat in the co-pilot’s seat. The sea was gorgeous, streaked with purple and orange as the sun set with majestic splendor behind a narrow ridge of clouds. Seabirds flew lazily back to land, and water slapped softly against the hull. Grace twisted off the cap and sipped the cold soda.

She said nothing and went into her head to prepare herself for what was to come. Her team was in peak condition and eager for a fight. So was Grace.

The captain cleared his throat.

“You call for a cab, Major?”

“What?”

He nodded to the waters off the port bow where a huge hulking shape was rising with surprising and eerie silence from the depths. She went out on deck and watched the 377-foot-long vessel rise so that its deck was almost level with the flat ocean. Only the conning tower rose into the twilight air like a giant black monolith. The displaced water from the submarine’s ascent rolled the fishing boat, and Grace had to grab a metal rail to keep her balance.

“Big boat,” said the DEA agent. “But… I’m guessing that it’s just my imagination that’s making me see an attack submarine out there.”

“Twilight over the ocean,” said Grace. “It can play strange tricks.”

“It surely can.” He sipped his Coke. “Major, I don’t know what’s going on and I probably don’t want to know, but your team don’t look like trainees and they don’t send out brand-new attack subs for just anyone. So… I’m not asking for any information, but can you at least tell me if there’s something I should worry about?”

Grace considered for a long moment. “Are you a religious man, Captain?”

“When I remember to go to church.”

“Then you might want to pretend this is Sunday,” she said, “and say a little prayer. The good guys could use a little help tonight.”

He nodded and held out his bottle. They clinked and he went back to his chair and pretended he didn’t see all the weapons and equipment that were off-loaded from his boat to the waiting sea monster that floated in the darkening waters. Ten minutes later, he was alone aboard his boat and the sun was falling toward the horizon with such a spectacular display of colors that it looked like the whole world was ablaze. For the first time since he’d taken this job out here, he didn’t like the look of that sunset. The reds looked like blood, the purples like bruises, and the blacks like death.

He keyed the ignition, fired up the engines, and turned in a wide circle to the northwest, back to Grand Bahama.

Chapter One Hundred Four

Even though it was the middle of the night, Hecate walked arm-in-arm with her father as she gave him a tour of the facility she and Paris had built. Her brother walked on Cyrus’s other side but did not touch his father. Otto drifted behind them. Behind him were two unusual men: the cold and silent Conrad Veder — who had been introduced as a close advisor to Cyrus — and the hulking Berserker, Tonton. Though Veder was a tall man, Tonton towered over him, and reeked of sweat and testosterone.

“Daddy,” purred Hecate, “we want to show you what we’ve done here. I think you’ll be so proud of us.” Since her emotional outburst at the Deck, Hecate had taken to calling Cyrus Daddy. Where this would normally earn a sharp rebuke, Cyrus seemed entranced by it. Or so Otto thought. All through the flight he had searched Cyrus’s face for some sign that he wasn’t at all taken in by the fiction of the Twins’ newfound and childlike devotion, but Cyrus avoided making eye contact with Otto.

“Certainly, my pet,” said Cyrus in a soothing and — most shocking of all to Otto — a fatherly tone. “Let’s see what you rascals have cooked up.”

Their first stop was the warehouse.

“It’s empty,” said Otto.

“Yes, it is,” said Paris with a proud smile. “The last shipments went out and everything is in place for your advertising campaign. It tickles me that your work is going to be largely funded by the sale of a legitimate product.”

Cyrus smiled and nodded. Otto said nothing, but he wondered if the Twins had somehow discovered what was in that water. There had been plenty of time for them to have run DNA and biological tests on the water, but would they have thought to do so? He ran a thin finger along the scar on his face, making sure that Veder could see it. It was a prearranged signal to be extra vigilant. Veder scratched his ear. Message received and understood.

The night was soft and vast, and billions of stars sparkled down on them as they strolled from the dockside warehouse up the flower-lined path to the main facility. The moon had not yet risen, but the compound lights had not been turned on. Instead the path was lighted by flaming tiki torches on poles.

The main entrance of the Dragon Factory had a short flight of stone steps up to a glass front with ten-foot-high double doors. Berserkers in lightweight black BDUs stood at attention at the open doors. Cyrus gave them each a smile but made no comment as he passed inside, but Otto touched Paris’s arm.

“These are the GMOs? Your ‘Berserkers’?”

Paris nodded. “As is Tonton. These guards are from the second team.”

“So, they’ve been field-tested?”

“Several times.”

“And the matter you came to the Deck to discuss?”

“Oh,” said Paris, “that’s only a factor of fieldwork. During downtime they’re quite affable.” He gestured for Otto to enter the building. Veder, lingering behind Otto, caught the momentary flicker of a smile on Tonton’s brutish face.

Inside the facility, Hecate led them through a series of labs, most of which held nothing new or of much interest to Cyrus, though he continued to smile and nod, as if this was all new and as exciting as a toy store. Several times he pointed to pieces of equipment and asked if he could have one for the Deck.

Hecate promised him everything. Cyrus was extremely pleased.

They passed through the main lab complex and Cyrus suddenly stopped, mouth open in awe at the statue that dominated the center of the room. A caduceus made from an alabaster pillar, hammered gold and jewels. Twin albino dragons coiled around the staff.

“Beautiful…,” he murmured.

Hecate and Paris exchanged covert smiles.

“Quite impressive,” said Otto with a total absence of reverence. He could have been appraising a broken clamshell on the beach. His eyes were locked on Cyrus and doubt ate at him. Cyrus was unstable at the best of times, and now he seemed entranced by the wonders of the Dragon Factory. Did the betrayal of the Twins knock something loose in Cyrus’s mind? Otto wondered. It was always a real possibility. Otto carried a pocketful of pills to handle different emotional extremes, but quite frankly, he didn’t know which one would be needed here — or if a pill was needed at all.

“And now, Daddy,” said Hecate as they stopped before a massive security door guarded by two more Berserkers, “we come to the real heart of the Dragon Factory. The Chamber of Myth. This is where we work our real magic!”

Cyrus clapped his hands.

Hecate placed her hand on a geometry scanner and waited as the laser light read every line, curve, and plane of her palm and fingers. A green light came on and a small card reader slid out of the wall. Hecate reached into the vee of her pale peach blouse and pulled out a swipe card on a lanyard. She swiped the card and heavy locks disengaged with a hydraulic hiss. One of the Berserkers gripped the handle and swung the door open. It was as thick as a bank vault door, but it opened without a sound.

Hecate stepped through and beckoned her father to follow. The whole party moved inside and there they stopped. Even Otto’s cynical disdain was momentarily forgotten as they stared around them at the things the Twins had made. At the impossible brought to life.

The room was designed to look like a forest from a fantasy story. The walls were painted with photo-real mountain ranges. Holographic projections of clouds drifted across a sky that could have been painted by Maxfield Parrish. Thousands of exotic plants and trees were arranged on hills sculpted from real rock and soil. On the branch of a nearby tree a winged and feathered serpent crouched, watching them with amber eyes. It was a perfect interpretation of the Quetzalcoatl of Aztec myth. In the distance a pair of snow-white unicorns nibbled at sweetgrass.

Several tiny people walked by, none of them taller than two feet. They wore green clothing and had pointed ears. As they passed they tipped their hats to Hecate, who curtsied. There was a gruff sound and the party turned to see a horse trot by, tossing its head haughtily. A pair of golden wings were folded against the horse’s muscular flanks.

“Can… can that thing fly?”

“Not yet,” admitted Paris, “but it’s the first specimen in which the wings are fully formed. We have to significantly reduce the muscle density of the horses so we can give them hollow bones. Otherwise it’s purely decorative.”

Conrad Veder’s insect coldness had fled and he stood smiling as a fat European dragon waddled by. It looked like a brontosaur with bat wings and was the size of a dachshund.

Paris smiled at him. “That’s a prototype. Arthurian dragon. So far we’ve been able to make them in miniature. George here is the oldest of six that we have. He’s four.”

George the dragon trundled over to Paris and bumped his head against Paris’s leg until he fished a treat out of his pocket and let the dragon eat it from his palm. “It’s a granola snack. High protein and vitamins but with sugar, sesame, and nuts. He loves them, which is why he’s so fat. C’mon, shoo, off with you…”

The dragon ambled off, munching his treat.

A larger shape clopped past them on heavy hooves. The lower half was a powerful Clydesdale, but the upper half was a bull-chested man. He shot a frightened glance at the strangers and moved quickly away.

“You have human-animal hybrids?” Otto asked.

“A few,” Paris said. “The centaur was one of our first, but he hasn’t made the psychological adjustment. He’s not a true specimen. There was a lot of surgery involved and extensive pre and postoperative gene therapy. We’ve sunk a lot of money into that line, but I think it might be a dead end. There are too many problems with genes that code in unexpected ways.”

“Have you had any successes with animal-human transgenics? Besides the Berserkers, I mean.”

“A few,” Hecate said but didn’t elaborate. “And quite frankly, they kind of freak out the buyers. People seem to want the animal exotics. Unicorns, miniature griffins, dragons, that sort of thing. The elves and kobolds are popular, though. Now that we’re getting word of mouth we’ve been getting requests for a lot of exotics that we never thought of.”

“Such as?” asked Cyrus.

“Oh… we’ve had a dozen requests for Cerberus. We haven’t successfully made one, though. We did make a samjoko, a three-legged bird, for a Korean buyer. We made a Jersey Devil last year, and we have an order for a chupacabra. Gargoyles, too. We get a lot of requests for those.”

“This is…,” began Veder; then he suddenly remembered where he was and why and left whatever he was going to say unsaid.

Paris smiled at him. “A lot of people are speechless. You should have seen the looks on the faces of a group of buyers from China when we trotted out an actual flying Chinese dragon. It was small, of course, but the buyers were entranced.”

Cyrus walked a few steps away from the group and bent down to pat the head of a swan-sized sea serpent that had raised its head from a koi pond. The animal shied back at first, but Cyrus cooed at it until the animal came closer.

“That’s our Nessie prototype. Pretty easy design. We want to get them to the size of a horse before we sell them.”

“Wonderful,” murmured Cyrus. “Absolutely wonderful…”

Hecate beamed. Paris smiled.

Otto and Veder exchanged meaningful looks.

“Your clients are worldwide?” asked Cyrus as he tickled the sea serpent under the chin.

“Yes.”

“How unfortunate.”

“Sorry…?” asked Hecate.

Cyrus smiled and without turning said, “It’s unfortunate because in less than two days you’re going to help me kill most of them.”

“What?” said Paris.

“Our clients?” asked Hecate.

Cyrus turned his head and the smile he wore was no longer the vapid grin of a father pleased with the antics of his clever children. It was a death’s-head grin of such naked malice that the Twins actually took a step backward from him.

“No, my young gods,” Cyrus said softly, “at noon tomorrow — you and I — will launch the Extinction Wave. By this time next year I’m afraid most of your clients will be dead.”

His hand darted out and caught the sea serpent by its slender throat, and with a vicious twist of his wrist he broke its neck.

“And the dead don’t need fucking toys.”

Chapter One Hundred Five

They moved silently through the night black waters of the North Atlantic. Nine figures in wet suits and tanks, each crouched over the cowling of a K-101 Hydrospeeder that plowed through the water at almost 10 miles an hour. The speeders were not the catalog versions — these new prototypes were being tested by Marine and Navy units in oceans and lakes around the world. Mr. Church had made a call and had a dozen of them flown in and lowered down to the deck of the USS New Mexico. Grace was sure that nobody else but Church could have made that happen this fast. The remaining three speeders were left behind on the submarine in case Joe and his team needed them.

Alpha Team set out from the sub thirty minutes after sunset. Divers from the New Mexico wanted to go with them and the boat’s captain wanted to send them, but Grace made it clear that this was a less-is-more situation.

“But Captain,” she added confidentially, “have your lads keep their suits on, because this will probably go from quiet to quite loud sometime this evening. At which point I’d like as much backup as you can send.”

“You’ll have it,” the captain promised. He was an ex-SEAL himself who had gone back to subs when he got too old for special ops. The gleam was there in his eye, and Grace left the sub feeling confident that he wouldn’t let her down.

Before she slipped into the water she made two last calls. The first was to Church for an update on the main wave of close support.

“Major, be advised that there is a lot of boat activity in your vicinity. Watercraft of all kind. We’re checking now to see if there’s an unusual run of sport fish.”

“No problem,” she said. “We’ll go in under them, but we’ll be careful of nets and hooks. How’s my backup coming along?”

“Every DMS agent in the continental United States is closing on your twenty, Major,” said Church. “In one hour we’ll have forty-six field operatives on the island. SEAL teams Five and Six are also inbound and we have twenty operators from Delta if we need them, but they’re an hour and ten out. Joe and Echo Team will get there first, but he’s still forty minutes behind you. He told me to ask you to save him something to do.”

“Bloody Yank,” she said, then added, “can I get a secure channel to him before we dive?”

Church hesitated. “How secure a channel?”

From the question, Grace knew for sure that Church was aware of the affair between his two most senior field commanders. She was glad Church wasn’t there to read her face. Sod it, she thought. “Very,” she said.

“I’ll arrange it.”

“Mr. Church… I don’t want another pair of boots on this island until I have that trigger device. We can’t risk showing our hand too soon, not when doomsday’s a button push away.”

“Roger that. But understand this, Major; if we don’t get that signal from you within thirty minutes of you making landfall we’re going to drop an E-bomb over the island. Your electronics will be fried along with everyone else’s.”

“So I’ll send up a flare. Blue if I have the device, red if I don’t.”

“I’d rather see that blue flare,” Church said, then added, “Grace… we can’t let Cyrus send that code. If he’s on that island and I don’t see a blue flare at the agreed time, then the EMP may not be the only bomb I’ll be forced to drop.”

“I understand. There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’ ”

He laughed. “Good hunting, Major.”

He disconnected, and Bug contacted her a minute later to say that she had a secure line to Joe Ledger.

“Go for Cowboy,” Ledger said.

“Joe… this is a secure line,” Grace said. “Just us. No ears of any kind.”

“Wow,” he said. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Joe, I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t mean to snub you—”

“Don’t sweat it. Been a funky few days.”

“About this morning… about what I said.”

“Yeah.”

“I… can we pretend I didn’t say it? Can we roll back the clock and reset the system?”

“I don’t know. Can we?”

“We have to.”

“Do we?”

“You know we do.”

Ledger said nothing.

“Joe… there’s too much at stake. When you reach the island, you have to be smart about this. I’m just another soldier. So are you. We’re professionals, not a couple of kids. If this gets hot tonight, then we have to follow procedure, stick to training, and not let any emotions interfere with our actions. End of story.”

There was a five count of heavy silence; then Ledger said, “I hear you.”

Grace said, “This… isn’t what I want. You understand?”

“I do,” he said sadly. “The mission comes first.”

“The mission comes first. Joe… I’ll see you there.”

“I’ll be there,” he said. “And Grace…?”

“Yes?”

“Good hunting, Major.”

“Good hunting, Captain.”

She disconnected.

That was an hour ago.

Now she lay on the Hydrospeeder as it cut through the water toward the Dragon Factory. Behind the clear glass of her goggles, Grace Courtland’s eyes were the hard, heartless eyes of a predator. They were the eyes of a soldier going to war.

They were a killer’s eyes.

Chapter One Hundred Six

I stood behind the pilot, and if my fingers were dug a little too tightly into the soft leather of his seat, then screw it. I stared out of the cockpit window at the blackness of the ocean below.

The pilot said, “Captain… wishing won’t make this bird fly any faster.”

“It might,” I said, and he laughed.

The co-pilot tapped my arm. “You have a call coming in on secure channel two.”

I went back into the cabin and screwed my earbud into place.

“Go for Cowboy,” I said.

“The fish are in the water,” said Church. “Two minutes to landfall. What’s your ETA?”

“Bailout in twenty, then drop time.”

“Good hunting, Captain.”

“Yeah,” I said, and switched off.

Top and Bunny were ready to go, their chutes strapped on and their weapons double- and triple-checked. All of us were heavy with extra magazines, frags, and flash bangs, knives, and anything else we could carry. If we hit water instead of land, we’d sink like stones.

“Alpha Team will hit the island in under two minutes,” I said.

“Wish we were with them, boss,” said Bunny.

Top studied me for several seconds. “It ain’t my place to offer advice to an officer,” he said, “me being a lowly first sergeant and all.”

I gave him a look.

“But I’m pretty sure there’ll be enough beer left by the time we get to this kegger.”

“There goddamn well better be,” I growled.

Chapter One Hundred Seven

Hecate and Paris stared in shock and horror as their father tossed the dead sea serpent aside and got to his feet.

“What… what are you talking about?” Hecate said.

Paris sputtered, unable to talk.

Cyrus mocked his son’s startled stutter, “I-i-i-’m sorry, Paris, did I speak too quickly? Use too many big words? Or are you simply as stupid as I’ve feared all these years?”

If Paris had been on the verge of saying something, those words struck him completely dumb.

Cyrus turned to Hecate. “And you, you feral bitch. I’d held you in higher regard until now. Did you actually think you had me fooled. ‘Daddy’?” He spit the distasteful word out of his mouth. “The day I become a fawning dotard I hope to God Otto puts a bullet in my brain.”

Otto smiled and bowed, and then he and Cyrus laughed.

Hecate looked back and forth between them. “What… what’s going on here?”

“I believe the Americans call it ‘payback.’ ”

“For what?” Paris blurted, finally finding his voice.

“How much time do you have?” sneered Cyrus. “For all those years when you two thought you had me imprisoned at the Deck. For treating me like a vapid old fool. For the disrespect you show me in every action, even when you are faking respect. For trying to steal Heinrich Haeckel’s cache of records. For trying to control me by staffing the Deck with your toadies.”

Otto laughed.

“Wait — you sent the Russian team to Gilpin’s apartment? And to Deep Iron?”

“Of course. Those records were supposed to come to me. It was an incident of mischance that Heinrich died before he could pass along the information about where the records were stored. Even his own family didn’t know what he had stored or where it was stored. For years we thought that all of that wonderful research was lost. Then in one of those moments of good fortune that reinforce the reality of a just and loving God, Burt Gilpin approached one of Otto’s agents with information about a cache of early genetics research. And what do we discover? That Gilpin used to work for the Jakoby Twins, that he was a computer consultant for them. Our Russian friends encouraged him to talk and he told us about how he helped the legendary Jakoby Twins install a revolutionary computer system called Pangaea. Did you know that he built himself a clone of Pangaea? That he used it to steal medical research in exactly the way you two were stealing it? Only he made the mistake of trying to sell the bulk research… and he tried to sell it to Otto.”

Cyrus shook his head slowly. “Stealing the schematics for Pangaea from me was very naughty… though I do admire you for that much, at least. But you had to take a smart move and plow it under with a stupid one by getting into bed with that parasite Sunderland to try and steal the MindReader system.”

“How—?”

“How do I know?” Cyrus cut in. “Because most of the people you trust work for me. I knew about the foolish plan to try and use the National Security Agency against the Department of Military Sciences. Were you on drugs when you conceived that idea? Did you think you could stop Deacon when the entire Cabal could not?”

Hecate and Paris looked confused.

“You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you? You don’t know who the Deacon is, do you? You don’t even know about the Cabal — about the thing that should have been your legacy. You’re so goddamned stupid that you truly disappoint me. Do you think that I was ever your prisoner? Ever? I’ve owned every single person you set to watch me. From the outset. You think you are so clever — my young gods — but I’m here to tell you that you are playing children’s games with adults.”

“We never—,” Paris began but Cyrus walked quickly to him and slapped him so hard across the face that Paris was knocked halfway around. He would have fallen had Tonton not stepped up and caught him.

“Don’t ever make excuses to me, boy. That’s all you’ve ever done. You were a disappointment as a child, and as a man you’re a joke. At least your sister has enough personal integrity to say nothing when she has nothing useful to say.”

As Tonton moved, Conrad Veder used the opportunity to shift his position. He had a plastic four-shot pistol in a holster inside his pants. The bullets were caseless ceramic shells that would explode a human skull. He could draw and fire in less than a second.

Hecate said, “What did you mean that you were going to kill our clients?”

Cyrus smiled. “You see, Paris? When she speaks she asks an intelligent question.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m sure you’ve wondered about the water. About whether there was something in it.” When Hecate nodded, he said, “Did you test it?”

“Of course. We found no trace of poisons or pathogens.”

“Naturally not. There are no pathogens in the water.”

Hecate nodded. “Genes,” she said. “You’ve figured out how to do gene therapy with purified water.”

Cyrus looked pleased. “You were always my favorite, Hecate. Not nearly the total disappointment your brother has become. Did you do DNA testing?”

“We started to,” she said. “We haven’t finished.”

“What did you think I put in the water?”

“One of the genes that encourage addiction. A1 allele of the dopa-mine receptor gene DRD2, or something like that.”

“If I was a street nigger who wanted to sell crack cocaine maybe,” Cyrus said harshly. “Have more respect.”

She shook her head rather than give the wrong answer.

“Otto and I — and a few very talented friends — have spent decades weaponizing ethnic-specific diseases. Ten years ago we cracked the science of turning inherited diseases like Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell anemia into communicable pathogens. Anyone with a genetic predisposition to those diseases would go into full-blown outbreak after even minimal exposure to the pathogen.”

“But there were no pathogens in the water!” Paris said.

“No. The pathogens are being released into lakes, streams, and reservoirs worldwide. The bottled water contains the gene for the disease. Drink a bottle of water… even brew a cup of tea with it… and specific ethnic groups and subgroups will develop the genetic disorder. Within a few weeks they will be vulnerable to infection from the pathogens in the regular drinking water. Or from exposure to anyone who has become infected. No one would think to look in the bottled water for the genes because no one can do gene therapy with bottled water.”

“No one except us,” said Otto. “Funny thing is… it wasn’t as hard as we thought.”

“But why?” demanded Hecate. “This is monstrous!”

“It’s God’s will,” said Cyrus. “It’s the beginning of a New Order that will purify the world by removing the polluted races. Blacks and Jews and Gypsies and—”

“Are you fucking crazy?” demanded Paris. “What kind of Nazi bullshit is this?”

Cyrus’s smile grew and grew. “Nazi. Now… the moron shows a spark of intelligence by choosing exactly the right word.”

Hecate looked confused. “Wait… you’re a Nazi? Since when?”

“Since always, my pet. Since the very beginning.”

“Since the beginning of what?”

“Since the beginning of Nationalsozialismus,” Cyrus said, letting his German accent seep through. “Since the beginning of National Socialism in Germany. For me personally, I first embraced the ideals while working in the reserve medical corps of the Fifth SS Panzergrenadier Division Wiking. But it wasn’t until I met Otto at Auschwitz that I discovered the full potential of the party ideals.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” snapped Paris. “That’s World War Two crap. You weren’t even born then…”

Otto and Cyrus laughed out loud. “Idiot boy,” said Cyrus, “I was older than you when I came to work at Auschwitz. I was older than you when I made a name for myself that the world will never forget.”

Paris shook his head, unable to grasp any of this.

“Father… you’re rambling,” said Hecate. “You were born in 1946.”

“No,” he said, wagging his finger back and forth, “Cyrus Jakoby was born in 1946. As were a dozen other cover names in six countries. But I was born in 1911.”

“That’s impossible!” said Paris.

Cyrus looked around. “We stand here in the midst of unicorns and flying dragons and you tell me antiaging gene therapy is impossible? Otto and I have been tampering with those genes for years. Granted there are…,” he gestured vaguely to his head, “… the occasional psychological side effects, but we’re managing those.”

“But… but…,” Hecate began. “If Cyrus Jakoby is an alias… then who are you?”

Otto said, “He’s a man you should be on your knees worshiping. Your father is the boldest, most innovative medical researcher of this or any generation.”

The Twins stared at him, and even Veder’s eyes flickered with genuine interest.

Cyrus touched his face. “Under all of this reconstructive surgery, beneath the changes I’ve made with gene therapy to change my hair color and eye color… beyond the façade,” he said, “I am the former Chief Medical Officer of the infirmary at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I am der weisse Engel—the ‘white angel’ that the Jews came to fear more than God or the Devil.”

He smiled a demon’s smile.

“I am Josef Mengele.”

Chapter One Hundred Eight

The guard never heard a sound. He strolled back and forth along the footpath between the docks and the main building. He chewed peppermint gum and glanced now and again at the stars. Patrol duty was boring. Except for the night when the hit came in, the months of his service at the Dragon Factory were a huge ho-hum, and he’d been off-shift that night. The hit team had been taken out by a Stinger dog and one of the Berserkers.

The guard hated the Berserkers. Those ugly goons got all the perks. Everyone thought they were so cool. Fucking transgenic ape assholes.

He spit out his gum and began to turn to pace back to the dock.

He never heard a sound, never felt anything more than a quick burn across his throat when Grace Courtland came up behind him and slit his throat from ear to ear.

Grace dropped the corpse and two of her men dragged it into the bushes away from the light from the tiki-torches.

She ran like a dark breeze along the edge of the path. Grace sheathed her knife and drew a silenced .22, and as she rounded the corner she saw two guards — one bending forward to light his cigarette from the lighter held in the cupped hands of the second. Grace shot them both in the head, two shots each.

The path ended at the front of the building where two immense men stood guarding the tall glass doors. There was too much light from inside the building for a stealthy approach. Grace signaled to Redman, her second in command. She indicated the guards and gave a double twitch of her trigger finger. Redman waved another operative forward and they flattened out on either side of the path and flipped night vision over the scopes of their sniper rifles. Both rifles had sound suppressors. It would drop the foot-pounds of impact, but at this distance the loss of impact would be minimal.

Redman fired a split second before Fayed. Two shots, two kills. The big guards slammed against the glass doors and fell.

Grace Courtland smiled a cold killer’s smile and ran forward.

Fifty yards behind her another group of shadows broke away from the wall of darkness under the trees. They were heading to the far side of the compound and did not see Grace and Alpha Team take out the guards or enter the building. Even if he had, the team leader, a harsh-faced man named Boris Ivenko, would have thought that he was seeing one of the many teams of Spetsnaz that were invading the island from every side.

Chapter One Hundred Nine

About damn time, I thought.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bunny nudge Top and then the two of them share a look. I must have had quite an expression on my face. I turned away and hoisted my poker face on.

There was a bing! in my earbud and then Church’s voice said, “Cowboy. Our spotters are seeing some activity around the island. Over two dozen small commercial fishing craft have closed on Dogfish Cay and launched boats.”

“What the hell? Don’t tell me the Navy’s jumped the gun on this.” “No,” he said. “They’re not ours.”

“Then who the hell are they?”

“Unknown at this time.”

“Russians?”

“Possible, but there are a lot of them. Early estimates put the number at over one hundred.”

“Christ. Any word from Grace? Do we have the trigger device?”

“She reported in just before I called you. She does not yet have the device. This situation is still fragile.”

Shit.

“Okay… keep all of the backup on standby. I’m seven minutes from my drop. I’ll get back to you with intel as soon as I’m on the ground.”

Chapter One Hundred Ten

Rudy Sanchez unscrewed the top of the bottle of ginger ale and poured a glass for the Kid. There was a plate of sandwiches that the boy hadn’t touched and an open pack of cookies from which one had been taken, nibbled, and set aside. The boy looked briefly at the soda and then turned his head away and continued to stare at his own reflection in the big mirror that covered one wall.

“You couldn’t sleep?” Rudy asked.

The boy shook his head.

“You probably have a lot of questions. About what’s going to happen. About your own future.”

A shrug.

“SAM…?”

“That’s not my name.”

“Sorry. Do you prefer to be called Eighty-two? No? Is there another name you’d prefer? You have a choice. You can pick any name you want.”

“That guy Joe called me Kid.”

“Do you like that? Would you like people to call you that?”

A shrug.

“Tell me what you’d like.”

The boy slowly turned his head and studied Rudy. He was a good-looking boy, but at the moment his eyes held a reptilian coldness. The brown of his irises was so dark that his eyes looked black, the surfaces strangely reflective.

“Why do you care?” said the boy.

“I care because you’re a teenager and from what Joe’s told me you’ve been in a troubling situation.”

The boy snorted. “ ‘Troubling.’ ”

“Is there another word you’d prefer?”

“I don’t know what to call it, mister.”

Rudy said, “I also care because you’re a good person.”

“How do you know?” The boy’s tone was mocking, accusatory.

“You took a great risk to warn us about the Extinction Wave.”

“How do you know I wasn’t just trying to save myself?”

“Is that the case? Did you take all of those risks to send those two videos and the map just to save yourself? You took great risks to help other people. That’s very brave.”

“Oh, please…”

“And it’s heroic.”

“You’re crazy.”

“No,” said Rudy. “Do you know what bravery is?”

“I guess.”

“Tell me.”

“People say that being brave is when you do something even when you’re afraid.”

Rudy nodded. “I imagine that you were afraid. You were probably very afraid, and yet you took a risk to send us this information.”

The boy said nothing.

“Why did you do it?”

“That’s a stupid question.”

“Is it?”

“It’s stupid because I had to do it.”

“Why did you have to do it?”

The boy said nothing. His dark eyes were wet.

“Why did you have to do it?” Rudy asked again.

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because I’m afraid.”

“What are you afraid of?”

Tears filled the boy’s eyes and he turned away again. He sat for a long time staring at his reflection. The lights were low and that side of the room was in shadows. It distorted the boy’s reflection, made him look older, as if the mirror was actually a window through which the boy could see his future self. A tear broke and rolled down one of his cheeks.

“I’m afraid I’m going to go to Hell,” said the boy.

Rudy paused. “Hell? Why do you think that? Why would you go to Hell?”

“Because,” said the boy quietly, “I’m evil.”

Chapter One Hundred Eleven

Hecate and Paris stood there, surrounded by the wonders they had created, and both of them felt as if the world had been pulled out from under them.

“Mengele?” Paris whispered. “I don’t…” He shook his head, unable to finish.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” said Cyrus, his eyes glittering. “Everything I’ve done has been toward one end. To purify the world. Tomorrow I’ll send a coded message to operatives all over the world. Some will release the bottled water; others will release pathogens into the water supplies; others will send computer viruses out that will crash the CDC and other organizations. In one coordinated movement a process will be set into motion that cannot be stopped. Nothing on earth can prevent the spread of the pathogen once released into the populations of the mud people.”

“ ‘Mud people,’ ” Hecate murmured. She looked dazed, her eyes glazed.

“Why?” asked Paris. “Why do… this?”

“To complete the work Otto and I began more than half a century ago. Otto, you see, is a nickname from his boyhood. His real name, his birth name, is Eduard Wirths. He was the Chief Medical Officer of the entire camp. He was my boss,” Cyrus said with a laugh.

“Well, only for a while,” said Otto. To the Twins he added, “Your father was and is brilliant. When he came to the camps as a young captain I was immediately entranced by his vision, by his insights. Every day we would work on the prisoners in the camps and then we’d talk late into the evening, reviewing our research, excited by the directions it was taking, by the possibilities it presented. We were doing the work that would make the dream of eugenics practical. But even then we knew that the science at our disposal was not adequate to the tasks. So we planned. We built a network of scientists and supporters who would continue the work long after Hitler’s war was over. Even in the early days your father and I knew that the war would never be won by Germany. But it didn’t matter. Our plan for the New Order of humanity was so much bigger than the aspirations of a single nation.”

“We knew what we had to do,” said Cyrus, taking up the thread of the story. “We hired spies to keep tabs on everyone who was doing work that would support our cause. Not just Germans, but Russians, and Americans. Even Jews. Anyone who was doing progressive research. When the war started going badly we had our friend Heinrich Haeckel smuggle copies of all of the research out of the country. Unfortunately, Haeckel suffered several strokes and was unable to communicate to us the location of the materials. Even then, though, we did not stop, did not falter. We built the Cabal — a network of scientists, spies, and assassins unlike anything the world had ever seen. Even today there are arms of the Cabal in every country, in every government. Your patron, Sunderland… his brother is a member of the Cabal; so is the man you called Hans Brucker, the man you hired to lead your hunts. Brucker is a product of our cloning program, along with many others who share his unique skill set.”

Here Cyrus flicked a glance at Conrad Veder, but Veder missed it. He was watching Tonton, who had been very slowly edging toward a security phone mounted on the wall. If the big man took two more steps, Veder would shoot him.

Paris shook his head. “This is all… too much. Why do this? What could you possibly gain from killing so many people?”

“Change,” said Cyrus. “The Extinction Wave will ultimately eliminate all nonwhites. All of them. And the whites who survive will have to fight for the right to dominate and rebuild the world.”

“You’re a fucking madman!” yelled Paris. “Both of you. You want to kill millions of people?”

“No, Paris,” said Cyrus, “not millions. Billions. We’ve already killed millions.”

“What… what do you mean?”

“The Extinction Wave is not our first attempt,” said Otto. “If you count the attempts that yielded only moderate results, this is our tenth phase. Phase six was our biggest success.”

“This will be much, much bigger,” said Cyrus.

“What was phase six?” asked Hecate.

Otto smiled like a vulture. “Your father took a disease that had presented in several chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys and reengineered it to work on humans. He released it into certain test populations in the late 1970s. It didn’t catch on as fast as we liked, but it gained a lot of traction in the eighties.”

Paris paled. “God… you’re talking about AIDS.”

“HIV,” Otto corrected, “but yes. It was introduced to homosexuals in the United States and Canada and then to the general population of Africa. It’s been quite effective.”

“You’re insane.”

“You keep saying that,” said Cyrus. “And while I admit that I do have some ‘moments,’ if you call me insane again I’ll have your hands cut off.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” asked Hecate.

Cyrus shrugged. “I was waiting to see how you matured. We wanted to see if you had the qualities we hoped you’d have. The qualities we tried to build into you.”

Hecate’s lips parted as his words sank in. “We’re part of your experiment, aren’t we?”

“Everything I do serves the New Order.”

Paris gagged. His eyes were wide and fever bright as understanding sank in.

Hecate looked at the white purity of her hand. “The story has always been that we were special. Cosmic children… all of that stuff. But we’re just part of a breeding program to make superior beings.”

“To make superior white beings,” corrected Otto. “Let’s keep perspective.”

Paris whirled and threw up into the bushes. The winged serpent on the tree branch hissed and flew away.

“I always said he had no stomach,” Cyrus said to Otto, who inclined his head. “We knew fifteen years ago that you were weak, Paris. You were the evidence that breeding programs would not be the answer. Even with the genetic manipulation to give you extra strength and intelligence, you’re still weak. That’s why the SAMs are so important.”

“ ‘SAMs’?” echoed Hecate. “The boy that looks like you, the one at the Deck. I’m sure I saw another one that looked just like him. Are they your sons?”

“No. Children have proven to be such a disappointment.”

“Then… what?”

“He’s me,” said Cyrus. “That’s why I call him SAM. That’s why I call all of them SAM. SAM. It’s an acronym.”

Hecate shook her head.

“SAM. Same As Me.”

She got it now and her eyes widened. “They’re… clones?”

“Yes,” said Cyrus. “And I have a lot of them. A whole family of them. Clones with transgenic enhancements. Superior beings. They will be the fathers of the new race, the race that will emerge from the chaos after the Extinction Wave has cleansed the world.”

Chapter One Hundred Twelve

“Evil?” said Rudy. “Why do you think you’re evil?”

“Because of who I am. Because of what I am.” The boy shook his head.

“That man you all work for, the one I thought was called ‘Deacon,’ he knows. You know, too.”

“I suppose I do.” Rudy kept his face bland. “You believe that you are a clone,” he said.

“I am!”

“A clone of Josef Mengele.”

“Yes.” The word was as harsh as a fist on unprotected flesh. “There are a lot of us. That’s why my name is Eighty-two.”

Rudy pushed the glass of ginger ale closer to the boy. He didn’t touch it. Rudy waited. The bubbles in the ginger ale popped. The second hand on the wall clock swept around in silent circles. Once, twice.

“I guess…,” began the boy. He coughed and then cleared his throat. “I guess my real name is Josef.”

The boy wiped the tears off his cheeks with an angry hand.

“Do you know who Josef Mengele was?”

“He’s me,” said the boy.

“No,” said Rudy. “You’re fourteen. Josef Mengele was born a hundred years ago.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re the same person.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Was Josef Mengele a good person?”

“No!” the boy said as if Rudy was an idiot.

Rudy smiled. “Well, we agree on that. Was Josef Mengele the kind of person who would have risked his own life to help other people?”

A shake of the head.

“Would that man have done what you did to contact Mr. Church — the Deacon — and ask for help?”

No answer.

“Would he?”

“No. I guess not.”

Rudy changed tack. “So there are eighty-two clones of Josef Mengele?”

“No,” said the boy.

“I don’t—”

“There are a lot more than that.”

“And you’re one of them?”

A nod.

“Are the others all like you?”

“We’re all clones, I told you.”

“No… I asked if they’re like you. Do they have the same personality?”

“Some do.”

“Exactly the same?”

No answer.

“Please,” said Rudy. “Answer my question. Do they all have the same personality?”

“No.”

“How can that be?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many of them would have done what you did? How many of them would have risked their lives to try and warn us?”

No answer.

“Are any of them cruel?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Are you cruel?”

“No.”

“Don’t you enjoy hurting people? Don’t you enjoy inflicting harm and—”

The boy gave him a sharp, hurt look. “No!”

“You mind that I asked that?”

“Of course I do. What kind of stupid question is that?”

“Why is it stupid? You said that you were the same as Josef Mengele. You said that you were evil. And you said that you were going to Hell.”

“I’m him; don’t you get that?”

“I understand that you’re a clone. I admit I’ve never spoken with a clone before, and until today I would have thought that a clone might carry some of the same traits and characteristics as the person from whose cells they were cloned. And yet here you are, a teenage boy who risked his life on several occasions to help stop bad people from doing very bad things. A boy who attacked a big security guard in order to try and stop the slaughter of unarmed people. A boy who could easily have done nothing.”

The boy said nothing.

“You may be cloned from cells taken from an evil man. Our scientists will determine that through DNA testing. If it’s true, then it changes nothing,” said Rudy. “Josef Mengele was a monster. Is a monster, I suppose, if Cyrus Jakoby is really him.”

“I’m pretty sure he is.”

“He’s such a terrible person… and yet you risked everything to save the very people he wanted to destroy.”

The boy looked at him.

Rudy smiled.

“You’re not him.”

“I am.”

“No,” Rudy said, “you’re not. You’ve just proven something that people have been arguing over for centuries. In fact, you may be living proof of the answer to a fundamental question of our human existence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, there’s the question of nature versus nurture. Is a person born with certain mental and emotional characteristics that are simply hardwired into him by genetics? Or do environment, exposure to other thoughts and opinions, and life experience determine who we are? I’d say that you are living proof that there has to be a third element permanently added to that equation.”

“What?”

“Choice.”

The boy looked at him for a long time and said nothing.

“There has never been a situation like this before. We’ve never had the chance to observe a clone and determine if that person is, or wants to be, exactly the same as the source entity.”

“They wanted me to be. Every day I had to learn about Mengele’s life and work. I had to learn surgery and about torture and war.” Tears streamed down his face. “Every day. Day after day after day.”

“And yet you chose a different path than the one they intended for you.”

The boy was sobbing now.

“You’re not him,” said Rudy gently. “He would never do what you did. And you could never do what he did.”

Rudy fished a plastic package of tissues from his jacket pocket and handed them to the boy, who pulled several out, blew his nose, wiped his eyes. Rudy did not try to physically touch the boy, not even a pat on the shoulder. It was an instinctive choice. The boy was solitary; comfort had to come from within.

They sat together in the interview room as the silent minutes burned away.

“There’s one more thing for you to think about,” said Rudy.

The boy looked at him with red eyes.

“Josef Mengele is one of the worst criminals of the last hundred years. A monster who has done untold harm to countless people and now wants to destroy a large percentage of the world’s population. The records we recovered indicate that he started the AIDS epidemic, and the new tuberculosis plague in Africa. Even if we stop him today, he’ll be reviled as the greatest mass murderer in history.”

“I know.”

“While you on the other hand…,” Rudy said, and smiled.

“What…?”

“You are very probably going to go down in history as the greatest hero of all time.”

The boy stared at him.

“We had no idea of the Extinction Wave,” said Rudy. “No idea at all. If it had not been for your act of bravery, for the choice you made, millions — perhaps billions — would die. We didn’t even know we were in a war until a little more than a day ago. You changed that. You made a choice. You took a chance. And if we succeed, if Joe Ledger and Major Courtland and the other brave men and women who are fighting right now to stop this madness are successful, it will all be because of you.”

“All I did was send two e-mails!”

“The value of choice is not in the size of the action but in its effect. You may have saved the entire world.” Rudy smiled and shook his head. “I can barely fit my mind around the concept. You’re a hero, my young friend.”

“A ‘hero’?” The boy shook his head, unable to process the word.

“A hero,” Rudy agreed.

The boy wrapped his head in his arms and laid them on the table and began sobbing uncontrollably.

Mr. Church watched all of this on his laptop, which was positioned so that only he could see it. The noise and motion of the TOC flowed around him. He removed his glasses and polished the lenses with a handkerchief and put them back on.

“Well, well,” he murmured to himself.

Chapter One Hundred Thirteen

Grace Courtland and Alpha Team moved quickly and quietly through the corridors of the Dragon Factory. They avoided people when they could, and when they couldn’t they killed. Redman and the others dragged bodies into closets or hid them under office desks. The team moved on, searching for Cyrus Jakoby, driven by the certain knowledge that time was running out.

They saw two more of the massive guards standing on either side of a huge hatch that was the size of a bank safe. The hatch stood ajar and the guards were alert. Grace crouched down behind a bushy potted plant at the far end of the corridor and studied them through the magnification of her rifle scope. The guards were unnaturally large, more muscular and massive even than steroid-enhanced bodybuilders. They had similar features: sloping foreheads with overhanging brows, blunt noses, and nearly lipless mouths. These had to be the bruisers Joe had encountered at Deep Iron, and she could well understand why Echo Team had thought they were up against soldiers wearing exoskeletons. The guard on the left had to have a chest that was seventy-five inches around and thirty-inch biceps.

Redman leaned close and whispered, “What the hell are they?”

“Transgenic soldiers,” said Grace.

“They look like gorillas.”

“No kidding,” said Grace dryly, and then Redman got it.

“Holy shit.”

“Fun with science,” Grace murmured. The hatch the soldiers guarded looked inviting, and she was willing to bet her next month’s pay that whatever was inside was important. She was also willing to bet that Cyrus Jakoby was in there. The guards were hyperalert, their posture absolutely correct.

“I need to get in there,” she said.

“We don’t have enough cover for two snipers. Have to take them one at a time.”

She shook her head. “No. That’s not going to work.”

She quickly outlined a plan that had Redman shaking his head before she was finished.

“It’s not a suggestion,” Grace hissed. “Do what you’re bloody well told.”

Redman nodded, but his face showed his displeasure.

Grace faded back around the bend in the corridor and quickly shrugged off her combat gear and jacket so that she wore boots, pants, and a black tank top. She removed the rubber band from her dark hair and shook it out. She slid a knife into her pocket and tucked her .22 into the back waistband of her fatigue pants.

“Be ready,” she whispered to Redman, and then she walked out into the center of the hall and strolled up to the guards.

The guard on the left spotted her first and tapped his companion. They both turned to see the tall, slender, beautiful woman walking toward them. Grace put just enough hip sway into her walk to catch their attention, and as she drew close she smiled up at them.

“This is a restricted area, miss,” said the right-hand guard.

“I know,” she said. “But I wanted to tell you guys something.”

“What?” asked the left-hand guard, but he leaned slightly forward, making no pretense of hiding the fact that he was looking down her top.

“Look what I have,” Grace said in a conspiratorial whisper.

The guards bent closer still.

She drew her pistol and shot the left-hand guard through the eye. A split second later Redman put a bullet through the right-hand guard’s forehead.

Grace smiled and waved her team forward, thinking to herself that men — even mutant transgenic ape soldiers — were all the same. Show them a little cleavage and they lose all sense.

She stepped to the edge of the hatch and peered carefully inside. She could see a group of people standing thirty yards down a foliage-lined path. She recognized the Jakoby Twins at once.

Suddenly warning buzzers began blaring overhead and a recorded voice blared from wall-mounted speakers, “Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!”

Down the hall there was a rattle of automatic gunfire and immediately automatic fail-safes activated and the hatch began to swing shut. There was no time to think; Grace leaped through the hatch and ducked behind a thick shrub just as the huge portal slammed shut.

Outside, Redman yelled as the hatch clanged into place. Gunfire and screams filled the air and people erupted from rooms and side corridors. Some were unarmed staff; others had guns. Everyone was yelling, and then the guards spotted them and began firing.

More gunfire came from behind.

There was no more time to think. Redman and Alpha Team dove for what cover there was and returned fire.

Chapter One Hundred Fourteen

We glided through the night, silent as bats, our night vision painting the world below us in shades of green and black. The three of us had tumbled out of the plane miles above the island, and for a long time we fell in total darkness. Skydiving at night is deceptive; after you become accustomed to the rush of air, all sense of movement ceases and you feel as if you’re floating. Without an altimeter to tell you the truth about how fast the ground is rushing up to meet you there is a very real chance you’ll find out in a last microsecond of surprise.

There was almost no wind, so we deployed our glider chutes at ten thousand feet. There is a moment where the resistance of the chute jolts every bone in your body, and then the glider takes over and once more you feel like you’re floating rather than falling. The glider has its own dangers built in because it doesn’t feel like you’re dropping down at all. It’s so smooth and steady.

I went through Airborne training in the Army, so you’d think I enjoyed throwing myself out of airplanes. You’d be wrong. I’m good at it, but I do not like it. Both Top and Bunny were more experienced at this sort of thing. Top used to teach it, Bunny did it on his days off. Doing it at night with no lights to steer by, having started seven miles up, isn’t my idea of a rollicking good time.

On the other hand, a high-altitude low open jump means that the bad guys usually don’t know you’re coming, so there are fewer bullets to try and dodge while you’re in the air. Kind of a silver lining.

We saw the landing point we’d chosen from the satellite photos and I tilted my chute forward to spill air out of the back and drop down, but suddenly I saw a ripple of bright flashes and heard the hollow pok-pok-pok of automatic gunfire. In the same moment I heard Church’s voice in my ear:

“Deacon to Cowboy, Deacon to Cowboy, be advised, the island is under attack. Identity and number of hostiles unknown. Estimate one hundred plus hostiles. Confirm; confirm.”

“Confirmed, dammit.” I tapped my earbud and identified myself. “Alpha Team, report location.”

“Alpha Team is inside the complex and taking fire,” Redman said.

“Hold tight,” I said. Back on the command channel I yelled, “Deacon, are any friendlies on the grounds?”

“Negative. Alpha Team is inside, other assets inbound. No friendlies on the ground.”

“Roger that.” I tapped the earbud once more as we circled around the line of trees and headed back to our drop site. “Echo Team, zero friendlies on the ground. Let’s rock and roll.”

While I was thirty feet above the dark lawn I saw four men in the same nondescript BDUs we’d seen on the Russians in Deep Iron. They didn’t see me. Sucked to be them.

I cut them down.

Gunfire flashed from our right, but I was below the tree line now. I stalled my speed and dropped to a fast walk, hit the release, and ran from my chute. There was no time to be neat and tidy. I headed straight for the cover of a close stand of palms, and I could hear rounds burning the air around me.

Bunny yelled, “Frag out!” and threw a grenade toward the muzzle flashes. I don’t know if he got any of them with the burst, but it gave him and Top a clear moment to land. They split up and went into the trees on either side of me.

The main building was on our left, the lawn and another row of trees to our right. There was a stone path lined with torches nearby, but half of the torches had been knocked over or torn up by gunfire. I saw a dozen bodies littering the ground between here and the door, and more sprawled on the steps.

I turned and headed toward the building, zigzagging behind trees and shrubs, firing at anything that moved. I killed a couple of exotic ferns that got caught in a breeze, but I also took down several of the hostiles.

“Grenade!” Bunny yelled, and slammed into me with a diving tackle that rolled us both to the foot of the stone steps as a blast tore a hole a few feet from where I’d been standing. I’d never seen the throw. Top spun and chopped up the hedges and a man screamed and toppled to the ground.

The steps offered no cover, but the main glass doors were intact despite dozens of impacts from armor-piercing rounds. High-density bulletproof glass. I scrambled to my feet and ran inside, crouching instinctively as a line of heavy-caliber bullets whacked into the glass. It held. So I turned and knelt to offer covering fire as Bunny and then Top ran from cover and risked the open ground near the steps. A ricochet bounced off the open door and pinged around the lobby for a heart-stopping moment before burying itself in the wall six inches from Top’s head.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

I held the door while they checked the hallway behind me. A crash door opened and six men wearing security uniforms rushed the hallway. Top and Bunny put them down with short bursts and I rolled into the doorway and put half a magazine in the next four who were running up a flight of metal stairs to this level.

“Clear!” called Bunny, and I backed away from the doorway.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Amazing, Cowboy to Amazing.”

No answer.

Then, “Headhunter to Cowboy.” Headhunter was Redman’s call sign.

“Go for Cowboy.”

“We’re hearing gunfire behind us. Sounds like M4s.” He described his location.

“That’s a roger,” I said.

“We could use a quarterback sneak.”

“Copy that. On our way.”

We ran down the hallway, passing several bullet-riddled bodies and the signs of mass panic. A lot of people had fled this way, dropping coffee cups and clipboards and trampling the dead.

We slowed. If Redman had heard our gunfire and could tell the difference between M4s and either the H&Ks used by the Dragon Factory guards or the Kalashnikovs carried by the Russians, then so could whoever they were fighting. The corridor was a long curve and the ambush was exactly where you’d expect it to be — at the sharpest point of the curve where decorative potted trees provided cover.

Top and I tossed our party favors at them and the fragmentation grenades ripped the ambush to pieces.

“Hopscotch!” I called, giving today’s code.

“Jump rope!” It was Redman’s voice.

We moved around the bend as his people came out from behind the meager cover they had found. Only six of Alpha Team could walk. Two were badly wounded — one with multiple gunshot wounds to the legs and the other with a facial lacerations from flying glass. A third — a new transfer from the SEALs — lay in the kind of sprawl that only looks like what it is.

“Report,” I said. “Where’s your commander?”

Redman turned toward the heavy portal. “She saw something and went in there just as the alarms kicked in. The door swung shut automatically.”

“Any sign of Cyrus Jakoby…?”

“From the way the major went diving into that room, I think she must have seen something.”

“Can you open it?” Top asked.

“Sure, if I had two hours and a lot of C4.”

I pointed. “There’s a keypad. Uplink to Bug and get him on it. If that thing has a computer control then let’s put MindReader to work on it.”

“Yo!” called Bunny from the sharp bend in the hallway. “We got company.”

“How many?”

“A shitload. We’re about to get outnumbered really fast.”

I cast a desperate look at the closed hatch. There was no time to break through. Damn it to hell. The advancing Russians began firing and bullets tore through the air, the ricochets turning the hallway into a killing floor.

“Fall back!” I shouted, pulling on Alpha Team members and shoving them down the hallway toward a set of exit doors. Bunny picked up one of the wounded and ran with him as lightly as if the soldier was a little child. Two other Alpha Team operatives grabbed the second. We had to leave the dead for now. Alpha Team looked hurt and angry. They didn’t want to leave Grace behind any more than I did, but there was no way we could hold this position.

We fired, we threw grenades, but we yielded ground yard by yard, letting ourselves be driven around the curving hallway until we could no longer see the hatch.

No bullets hit me, but as I backed around the corner I felt like I’d taken a fatal wound to the heart.

Grace.

Chapter One Hundred Fifteen

Grace moved behind the rows of exotic plants, closing on the Jakobys in a wide circle. The artificial terrain was uneven, and at times she had to tuck her pistol into her belt in order to climb a rock or up and down a ravine. Mammals and birds scattered from her and at first Grace took no notice of them, but then a creature stepped briefly into her path that froze her heart and almost tore a cry of surprise from her lips. The creature had the twisted legs of a goat, a roughly manlike torso, black bat wings, spiked horns, and a grinning face that was out of ancient nightmares.

It was a gargoyle.

Grace stared, not knowing what to do. She forced herself to remember where she was. These people made monsters. This was just another perversion of transgenic science… but a wave of atavistic fear gripped her heart as the monster climbed onto a rock and stared down at her with bottomless black eyes.

Then, in the space of a few seconds, Grace’s perception changed. The gargoyle was three feet tall, and it moved with an awkward jerkiness of limb that looked clumsy and painful. As Grace moved slowly up the slope, the creature scuttled away, but it threw a single penetrating look at her before it disappeared under a fern. In that moment, though, Grace saw a human intelligence in the lustrous black eyes and a depth of horrified self-awareness that chilled her to the bone. In some grotesque way the transgenic animal was partly human, and that fragment of its mind was totally aware of its own wretched nature. Sadness crashed down on her as she stared after it. Then a moment later the sadness was overwhelmed by a burning fury as the enormity of this abomination of nature struck her. She set her jaw and drew her weapon and continued her hunt for the real monsters here in this chamber.

She tried to contact the TOC or Joe, but all she got from the earbud was a low-level buzz. A jammer. It must have kicked in when the building went on alert. Grace hoped that Church would realize what was happening and order the drop of the E-bomb.

Grace found a path that looked like it was used by the groundskeeping staff and she ran along this, circling closer and closer, trying to hear the conversation. Eventually she moved into a natural blind formed by the edge of a decorative waterfall and there she stopped. The waterfall was built over rock, but the back was clearly made from painted metal. She ran her hands along it and found the edges of a doorway fitted so snugly into the façade that it was virtually invisible. A door or an access panel of some kind. She filed it away for later.

Grace could see all six of the people in the room. She recognized the Jakoby Twins easily enough — tall, white as snow, and beautiful. The brute standing near them was one of the transgenic guards, though he was bigger than any of the others she’d seen. The two older men were strangers, but she felt that it was safe to guess that one of them was Cyrus Jakoby and the other possibly Otto Wirths. The last of the men there startled her and also made her feel like the earth was shifting under her feet.

If the photos Mr. Church had shown were correct, then this was Gunnar Haeckel.

Or Hans Brucker.

Both of whom were dead.

So… who was the tall man with the calculating expression? Another clone?

Clones, transgenics monsters, ethnic-specific pathogens.

She was surrounded by monsters.

Grace drew her pistol and leaned close to listen.

“—Your little magic castle is about to come tumbling down,” said Cyrus Jakoby.

Hecate sneered. “You may find that more difficult than you imagine, Father. We’re not exactly vulnerable here.”

“Which is why we brought enough muscle to sweep past whatever defenses you have,” said Otto.

“Maybe,” said Paris. “And maybe your guns for hire are about to encounter a few surprises.”

“The teams know about your Berserkers. Ape DNA does not provide protection from armor-piercing rounds.”

Paris smiled. “No, but the Berserkers are not the only defenses we have. You’ll see.”

Otto gave a small shrug. “Yes, we’ll see.”

“What I want to know,” said Hecate, “is why you’re doing this. Why attack us at all?”

“Retribution, Miss Jakoby. You attacked the Hive.”

“The Hive? What the hell’s the ‘Hive’?” said Paris.

“In Costa Rica?” prompted Otto, but the Twins shook their heads.

Cyrus studied both of the Twins, checking body language and eye movement. He frowned. “You really didn’t attack the Hive,” he concluded.

“We still don’t know what it is.”

Cyrus didn’t elaborate. His expression, at first bemused, quickly darkened. “Then what happened to Eighty-two? Who hit the Hive? Who took him?”

“It had to be a military hit.” Otto frowned. “Question is… which government?”

“Could be Germany,” suggested Cyrus savagely. “Our former homeland would love to see our heads on pikes. Or it could be the Americans.”

“Then why didn’t they hit the Deck, too?”

Cyrus shook his head. “If the military took the Hive, then it’s possible that Eighty-two was killed along with the rest of the staff.”

“It would be better than being taken.” Otto’s voice said one thing, but his eyes conveyed a different message. All of the psychological profiles that had been done on Eighty-two had indicated that the boy did not have a predatory nature, that he lacked the strength to be a killer. It was so anomalous a finding that Cyrus had refused to accept it, had killed the testing doctors, had made Otto try over and over again to prove that Eighty-two was truly a part of the Family, that the boy’s loyalties were not a “given.” Now this belief could possibly be put to the test under interrogation by the United States. The boy could already have broken. Military forces could be closing in on the Deck even now.

Cyrus looked deeply hurt and it took him a moment to master his voice enough to speak. “We have to move up the timetable for the release.”

“The real question,” interrupted Hecate, “is why you sent assassins here to kill us.”

“Only one of you.”

“Why?” she insisted.

“Call it a Darwinist experiment.”

“What… you’d use the murder of one to identify which of us had the greater survival instinct and then try to bargain with the survivor?”

Cyrus applauded. “You see, Otto? I always said that she was the smarter twin.”

“You miserable old prick,” growled Paris. His hand strayed toward his pocket.

Instantly Conrad Veder pulled his pistol and pointed it at Paris. The movement was so fast and fluid that the weapon seemed to appear in his hand as if by magic.

“Make no mistake,” said Cyrus, “Conrad will blow your head off if I tell him to. Now pull that dart gun with two fingers and throw it in the pond. You, too, Hecate. And tell your pet ape to stay exactly where he is.”

Tonton curled his lip. “That little popgun won’t do shit.”

Veder’s face was neutral. “There’s a simple way to find out.”

Cyrus chuckled. “Kill anyone who moves, Conrad.”

The Berserker held his ground. Paris carefully removed his gas dart gun and threw it away as ordered. It made a splash near the dead sea serpent.

“Father,” said Hecate, ignoring Veder’s pistol and the order to dispose of her own, “what do you want from us? Why come here? Why tell us all of this now? Why spring it on us rather than bring us in?”

“Those are the right questions, my pet,” said Cyrus, nodding approval. “I’ll bet Paris didn’t even think to ask. This is quite simple, Hecate. You have to make a choice. The Extinction Wave is going to launch.” He fished a device from beneath his shirt, an oversized flash drive attached to a silk lanyard. “This sends the codes that will begin an irrevocable change. Truly only the strong will survive. Granted, you’re white and you’ve been engineered to be immune to any of the pathogens or genetic diseases we’re using, but afterward there will be war as I said. The strongest will survive. Otto and I have prepared for the war. We will survive. If you join with us — willingly join with us — then you can share in the benefits of our protection, and together, as one Family, we can usher in the New Order.”

“Join you?” said Hecate distantly.

“You’re fucking nuts,” said Paris. “You stand there and tell us that you started the AIDS epidemic. You brag about that? Then you say that you want to kill four-fifths of the people in the world?”

“More like six-sevenths,” Cyrus said.

“Jesus Christ. You think this is a frigging joke? You’re trying to destroy the world.”

“We’re not trying to do anything,” said Otto. “We are going to remake it.”

Paris spit on the ground in front of Cyrus. “I hate you,” he snarled. “I hate that I have your blood in my veins. I hate—”

“Shut up, Paris.”

Everyone turned toward the person who spoke.

Hecate.

Her blue eyes were laced with veins of hot gold.

“What… what did you…?” Paris said.

“I told you to shut up,” she said. “Father’s right. When you open your mouth you embarrass yourself. You embarrass the Family.”

Paris stepped close to her but pointed at Cyrus. “Have you lost your mind, too? Are you subscribing to this bullshit? Are you saying that you support this fucking monster—”

Hecate struck him across the face. It wasn’t a slap. She punched him so hard and fast that he spun in place, his jaw knocked out of shape, teeth flying from between his rubbery lips. He stood erect for a trembling moment and then he collapsed to his knees, blood gushing from his shattered mouth. His eyes rolled high and white and he fell forward onto the grass.

Everyone stared at her in shock. Hecate stepped over her brother’s body and walked over to her father and only stopped when their faces were inches apart. Veder shifted slightly to keep his weapon on her. Otto stood apart, his face still registering shock and uncertainty.

Hecate leaned close to her father until her lips were an inch from his ears.

“Father,” she said. “Why wait until tomorrow? If we’re going to burn the world down… why not start right now?”

And she kissed him on the cheek.

Cyrus Jakoby’s chest hitched with a sob that broke the stillness of the moment. He threw his arms around Hecate and crushed her to his chest.

“My pet,” he said, tears filling his eyes.

Grace Courtland stepped out from behind the waterfall and raised her gun in a two-hand grip.

“This is all bloody touching,” she said, “but you have two seconds to give me that bloody trigger device before I blow your twisted brains all over the landscape.”

And then the lights went out.

Chapter One Hundred Sixteen

The exit doors were steel and we made our stand there. The Russians kept coming. The hallway was choked with them, and the front rank held ballistic shields. They advanced as far as the hatch and then held their ground. It was clearly their target and they had the manpower to take and hold it. I couldn’t see what they were doing, but I heard the whine of a high-power drill. I never did find out if they brought it with them or found it on the premises, but they were attacking the hatch.

I tapped my earbud.

“Cowboy to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon.”

“We’re taking heavy fire and casualties.” I gave him the bad news about Grace. “There’s no way to know if the trigger device has been activated. If you have the cavalry out there, now’s the time to blow the bugle.”

“They’re already inbound. Three DMS teams are on the island. Quicksilver Team has taken the south beach. India and Hardball teams are on the docks. SEAL team Six is five minutes out.”

“The trigger device…”

“We can’t take any more chances, Cowboy. We have to take out the electronics.”

That would fry the active team communication as well, and we both knew it. But he was right. We were out of options.

“Do it!” I yelled.

Bullets hammered the metal doors and I had to shout to my men. “Church is launching the EMP. We’re going to go radio dark in a few minutes!”

It was not good news. In the dark with no radio, in a firefight where everyone was wearing black BDUs, friendly fire was quickly going to become as much of a threat as enemy fire.

Top leaned close to me. “If those Spetsnaz sonsabitches get through that hatch…” He left the rest unsaid.

“We saw guards come up from downstairs,” said Bunny. “Maybe there’s a way to flank these bozos.”

I grabbed Redman and pulled him close.

“Hold this position. I’m going to take Echo Team downstairs and see if we can come up on the far side, catch these assholes in a cross fire. DMS and SEAL teams are on the island and have been apprised of your position.” He started to protest, but I cut him off. “Protect your wounded and hold this end of the hall. We have to get back to that hatch. Everything depends on it.”

“Don’t stop for coff ee on the way, Captain,” said Redman.

I gave him a wink and dashed down the stairs with Top and Bunny on my heels.

We went down two flights of metal stairs, going so fast that we pushed the envelope of safety on the corners. We knew our backs were protected, so all of us had our M4s pointed down. When a guard actually did step out we cut him to ribbons before he got off a single shot.

The security door on the next landing down was locked. Bunny tried to pick it, but even though the tumblers moved, the door held fast.

“Must be a drop bar or something,” he said.

“Let’s go one more level down and if that doesn’t work we’ll come back up and try to blow the door.”

We moved down two more flights into the underbelly of the building. Maintenance level. Poorly lighted, the ceiling crisscrossed with pipes, big generators rumbling with subdued thunder. It was hot and moist down here, and water dripped from the ceiling. The maintenance floor had a security door, too, but it was propped open with a chair. An ashtray and a copy of Popular Mechanics lay on the floor. God bless the lazy janitors everywhere. Once inside we found a second door that was similarly blocked, but there was a draft here and the sound of distant gunfire. I shined my flashlight up and saw a long concrete utility ramp that went all the way to the surface.

“Wait here,” I said, and ran up the slope. There was a heavy grilled outer door set with a pivoting drop bar, but the bar was in the upright position and the door stood up and open. I peered out and saw the backs of at least fifty Russians engaged in a firefight with some other force. From the ramp I couldn’t tell if they were fighting the Dragon Factory guards or our own boys, and I was in no position to participate in this fight. So I retraced my steps and found Top and Bunny.

They stood back-to-back, pointing their guns into the bowels of the maintenance area, their bodies tense and alert.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Don’t know, Cap’n,” said Top. “Heard something weird.”

“Weird?”

Before he could answer there was a clickety-click sound somewhere near. Like toenails on concrete.

“Guard dog,” Bunny said.

“He ain’t barking,” Top said.

“Not all of ’em do.”

I sighted down the barrel and did a slow sweep. Suddenly something moved from left to right, breaking cover from behind the steel case of a big blower and darting behind a row of stacked crates.

“What the fuck was that?”

“Dog?” Bunny said, but this time he made it a question.

“Didn’t look like no dog to me,” Top said.

I had to agree. The silhouette was all wrong. The body was big, about the size of a mastiff, with thick shoulders and haunches, but the head shape was wrong and the tail was… weird. Too big and curling all the way over its back to beyond its snout.

The scuttling sound came again. This time to our right.

“Two of’em,” Top said.

Then we heard it behind us.

“Three,” Bunny said.

I turned. “More than that,” I said. At least four of the weird shapes filled the darkness of the ramp that led outside. They ran toward us with frightening speed.

“Jesus Christ,” Bunny said, and I turned as one of the creatures moved through a patch of light.

It was a dog. Or it had started out that way. God only knows what you’d call it now. The body was as broad and solid as a bullmastiff, the hair midnight black. The face was a twisted parody of a dog’s, but the snout and head were covered with what I first thought was some kind of armor like they used to put on fighting dogs centuries ago. I could have dealt with mastiffs in armor. That was scary, but it wasn’t nightmare stuff.

But as the creature moved back through the lamplight I saw that the armor ran all the way down its back and covered its sides, where it eventually thinned and blended with the dog’s natural fur. The armor plating gleamed like polished leather. But what sent a flash of horror all the way down through my brain and heart and guts was what rose above the dog’s back. It wasn’t a dog’s tail. The appendage that curled over the massive back and shoulders of the dog was a huge, segmented scorpion tail.

There were at least a dozen of them now… closing on all sides.

The one in the spill of light paused, its tail trembling above it, the stinger dripping hot venom. Its muzzle wrinkled back to show rows of sharp white teeth and it glared at us with eyes as black as the Devil’s.

With a monstrous howl of unnatural hate, the creature ran at us.

And then the others rushed at us from all sides.

Chapter One Hundred Seventeen

There was a sharp crack, and a bullet cut through the darkness so close that Grace could feel the heat. She threw herself to one side and crashed into a row of thorny shrubs. Needles jabbed her and plucked at her clothing as she rolled over the shrubs and scrabbled to find solid ground. She kept her pistol by sheer luck and was glad of the lethal promise of it as she fumbled her way through the absolute blackness. All around her exotic creatures screamed in voices never before heard outside of nightmares.

“What happened to the lights?”

“It’s a fail-safe,” Hecate said. “If there’s gunfire in the building the whole facility goes into a forced lockdown.”

“Did you hit her?” someone asked. Grace thought it was Otto.

“I don’t know,” came the reply. Both voices were off to her right, so Grace kept moving to her left. The ground sloped under her and she crouched low, using her free hand to feel for obstacles.

“The security lights will be on any moment,” said Hecate, and as if to punctuate her words several overhead lights flared on. The light was weak but more than enough to see by. Grace dodged behind a mound of clover and flattened out.

Hecate led her father to a cleft in a rock wall. Otto squeezed in with them. Tonton and Veder found cover behind nearby foliage.

“Who was that bitch?” demanded Otto. “Was she one of yours?”

“No,” said Hecate. “I thought she was one of yours.”

“I don’t care who she is,” snapped Cyrus. “Veder, kill her.”

The assassin moved off without a word, melting into the foliage and vanished without a trace.

“Tonton,” said Hecate, “hunt.”

The Berserker grinned broadly and ran in the direction where Grace had been. As soon as he reached the waterfall he stopped, bent low, and sniffed; then he turned and ran down the path.

“What’s he doing?” asked Otto.

“He has more than ape strength,” said Hecate. “We’ve been experimenting with them, giving them additional combat useful skills. His olfactory senses are much sharper than a human’s. He’ll sniff her out.”

Grace heard the big man coming. She was down several rounds, so she quickly swapped out her magazine and found a spot with limited access from behind. She could command a three-sided view. While she shifted she processed what she had learned. One point was the name of the man who looked like Haeckel and Brucker. Cyrus had called him first Conrad and then Veder. Conrad Veder was another of the assassins of the Brotherhood of the Scythe.

A strange idea occurred to her and as she thought it she somehow knew that it was true. Haeckel and Veder were two of the four assassins of the Brotherhood. They looked identical, and it was no stretch under the present circumstances to accept that they were clones from the same cell line. It seemed likely that all four of the assassins of the Brotherhood were clones. The same level of skill because they were all, in essence, the same person. Was deadly accuracy and a coldness of heart hardwired into the genetic code? She didn’t know and would have to explore that with Hu and Rudy one of these days.

At the moment she had to focus on the big killer who was coming her way. The one Hecate had called Tonton. The Berserker moved with a surprising economy of movement, leaping over rocks, climbing with simian ease, hopping from rock to rock across a stream. Grace steadied her pistol and waited until he was within perfect pistol range.

Tonton suddenly stopped and crouched low, his eyes scanning the ground. He followed the path the woman must have taken, and he knew where it led. If she got into the cleft by the south corner, then she would have solid rock at her back and a flat shooting platform. He smiled. If he’d taken three more steps, his head would have risen above the hump of the next hill and that would have been the ball game.

“Smart bitch,” he murmured.

He turned and ran to his right into the brush. She may have the better position, but he knew every inch of the Chamber of Myth.

Veder had no intention of trailing the woman through the dense jungle environment of this chamber. It was foolish and it was a waste of his skills. Instead he scouted the terrain and picked out the three or four best places to set an ambush. If this woman was smart, she would be in one of them. Veder carefully surveyed the angles of each. They were all good, but there was one — a ledge that was partially screened by tendrils of Spanish moss — that offered an angle to the other two. If the woman was not there, then he could crawl onto the ledge and wait until that ape found her. If the Berserker killed her, so much the better. Veder wasn’t being paid extra for this. If the woman killed the Berserker, then Veder would be able to find the spot from which she fired and then he’d take her out.

The decision was a practical one. Once he made it, Veder pocketed his pistol and began to climb.

Chapter One Hundred Eighteen

The creatures howled like demons as they closed on us. The nearest was thirty yards away and its tail whipped back and forth, clanging on the overhead pipes. I hit it with a short burst and the creature slewed sideways, blood and pieces of its shell flying into the air. The others stopped for a second, but then the wounded one hissed and scuttled forward, bleeding but far from dead.

“Oh, fuck,” said Bunny, and opened up into the mass of them.

“Frag ’em!” I yelled. Our M4s were fitted with the new M203 single-shot 40mm grenade launcher mounted under the barrel forward of the magazine. It had a separate handle and trigger, so I grabbed that with my left while holding the primary rifle hand with my right. It gave me two guns at once — and I needed all of the immediate firepower I could muster. The downside was that the grenade launcher was a single-shot.

I aimed for the center of the biggest mass of them and fired.

The explosion tore three of them to pieces, and I suppose it was comforting to know that beneath the insect carapace there was a flesh-and-blood animal. Not sure if it could still be accurately called a dog, but it could die like one.

Top turned and fired up the concrete ramp. The confines of the ramp maximized the force of the explosion, and it tore the creatures apart and blew a hot, wet wind back at us that painted us with gore.

Far above us there was a rumble of thunder and all at once every light in the underground flared and then winked out.

“EMP!” I yelled.

“This is not a good fucking time!” bellowed Bunny. He dug desperately into his pockets to produce a handful of chemical flares. He broke and shook them and then threw some of them in all four directions. The creatures had been as startled by the darkness as we had, and I realized that their eyes were still canine. Dogs could see in poor light but were as blind as we were in total darkness.

“I think you just turned on the EAT AT JOE’S sign,” I said.

The creatures immediately began rushing at us again.

“Frag out!” Bunny yelled, and threw his grenade. It hit the back of one of the animals just as it flicked its tail, and the round took a little hop as it burst. The downblast flattened one monster and tore the guts out of the pipes above. Water and steam showered the animals and there were even higher-pitched screams as they were scalded. In their confusion and fury two of the scorpion-dogs turned on each other in a murderous frenzy, the stingers stabbing over and over again until they both staggered away on trembling legs and then collapsed, victims of each other’s poison.

Top had his back to mine and we fired continuously as more of the creatures swarmed out of the darkness.

“Aim for the head!” I cried.

At first the sheer numbers of them that rushed toward us pushed along the corpses of the monsters we killed, but then Bunny got into the game and threw a hand grenade first to Top’s side and then to mine. The blasts deafened us but decimated the creatures. On both sides the front ranks were blown to bits, and the creatures backed off for another hesitant second and then rushed us again.

“I’m out!” Top called, and Bunny started firing while Top switched magazines. As soon as he started firing I went dry and Bunny covered me.

There were ten left.

We emptied another magazine each.

Then there were seven. Fifteen feet away.

Too close for another grenade. Bunny opened up with his rifle.

Four. Ten feet.

Top burned through an entire magazine as they nearly reached our firing position.

Two. One whipped its tail at me and the sharp stinger stuck in the Kevlar chest protector.

Bunny jammed his rifle against its head and pulled the trigger.

It leaped at Top and bore him to the ground. The scorpion tail whipped around Top as he screamed and twisted to one side, then the other. I couldn’t risk a shot, so I kicked the monster in the face, once, twice, drawing blood, hurting it, but it snarled in pain and fury and tried to bite my foot.

Then Bunny did something that was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. He jumped on top of the monster and used his body mass to pin the powerful tail to the dog’s back. The stinger shook and twitched inches from Top’s face.

“Get it off me!” Top screamed, and his voice was filled with pain. I couldn’t tell how or where he was hurt. The mastiff — even without the ponderous tail — had to weigh 250 pounds of powerful muscle, and all of that mass was crushing down on Top. And Bunny’s enormous body was piled on top of that. Fat drops of venom dripped from the stinger and splashed Top’s forehead and cheeks.

I drew my leg back and kicked the brute as hard as I have ever kicked anything. I could feel its bulging side collapse under the impact. Ribs broke and the creature let out a disturbingly normal dog yelp, but the kick did the trick and the creature reeled sideways. I shuffled in and kicked it again, just as hard. The scorpion-dog fell over and Bunny pulled at it, forcing the thing away from Top. The big young man and the dog rolled over and over and then Bunny locked his arm around the monster’s bull neck. He was growling more savagely than the dog. I could see his massive arm muscles swell under his shirt and then Bunny jerked his whole body up and back. The was a huge wet crack! and then the monster dog flopped into limp stillness.

Bunny rolled off it, gasping, saying. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit…”

I knelt over Top, who was struggling to sit up. I was mindful of the venom on his face and I tore open a first-aid kit to find some gauze pads to dab it up.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said with a wince. “Think my ribs are busted.”

I undid the Velcro on the Kevlar and probed his sides. The hissed intakes of breath told us both the news.

“Your whole side’s cracked. Five, six ribs.”

“Fuck me,” he said, and tried to reach his right hand across to feel for himself, and then another jab of pain shot through him. “God damn it…”

I felt wetness under my fingers as I continued to probe. “You’re bleeding.”

Very gingerly I lifted his shirt and looked at his back. I was almost sorry I looked. The brown skin of his side was slick with red blood, and in the midst of it two white and jagged ends of bone had torn through flesh and muscle.

“Is it bad?”

“It ain’t good.”

“Tell me, Cap’n.”

“You have a couple of compound rib fractures. I can stop the bleeding, but we can’t set them right now.”

“God damn it… I want to be in this fight.”

“Dude,” said Bunny, who was standing above us now, checking our perimeter, “you were just in a firefight with mutant monsters. You’re going to be able to brag about this shit for — like—ever.”

“If there’s a world to brag to, Farmboy. We ain’t caught up to them Nazi psychos yet, or did you forget?”

“Point taken.”

“You want painkillers, Top?” I asked after I was finished with a quick patch job.

“Just say no to drugs,” he grumbled.

“Let’s see if you can stand.”

We helped him up and there was no way to do it that didn’t hurt. Top called us names I won’t repeat. Bunny steadied him as he tried to walk. He could manage it, but there was no way he was going to get back into this fight. We all knew it.

“Look, Cap’n, you and Farmboy gotta get going. I’ll guard the stairwell.”

“You can’t fire a gun—,” Bunny began, but Top cut him off.

“I can shoot a pistol, son. Want me to show you? Bet I can kneecap you from here.”

“Okay, okay,” Bunny said, “grouchy old bastard.”

“Clock’s ticking,” Top said to me. “You need to be gone.”

“We are gone,” I said, and turned away to head into the complex. After a moment I heard Bunny coming behind me.

I looked back once and saw Top standing there in the doorway. The dead monsters were all around him, and he looked like an ancient warrior on some battlefield out of legend. He sketched a small wave, and then Bunny and I rounded a bend and he was gone.

Chapter One Hundred Nineteen

“Blackwing Three to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon.”

“Package has been delivered,” said the pilot. “It’s the night the lights went out in Georgia.”

“Roger that. Well done, Blackwing.”

Church leaned back in his chair and stared at the array of screens that had, until moments ago, relayed images from helmet cams of every DMS field operative on Dogfish Cay. Now all of the screens were dark except for the night-vision image from the satellite.

He heard someone come up beside him.

“What just happened?” asked Rudy Sanchez.

Church explained about the electromagnetic pulse bomb. “If we’re lucky, then Cyrus won’t be able to access a working computer terminal in order to send out the code for the Extinction Wave.”

“If we’re lucky?” repeated Rudy. “Dios mio.”

The satellite image showed hundreds of bright dots, milling around across the island. Every few seconds a brighter spot would flare.

“What’s that?”

“Thermal scans of the battle. Each dot is a signature for a combatant. The flares are explosions, probably grenades.”

“Which ones are ours?”

“We’ve lost all telemetric feeds from the island,” said Church.

“Which means what?”

“Which means we don’t know which ones are ours.”

The collision of the hundreds of dots made no sense to Rudy. Everyone seemed to be right on top of everyone else. All those soldiers, each person dressed in black, out of communication even with their own teammates. It was a frightening thought to him, and he could only imagine the terror the men on the island must be feeling.

“You’re a religious man,” said Mr. Church. It wasn’t framed as a question, but Rudy nodded.

“Yes.”

“Now would be a useful time for prayer.”

Chapter One Hundred Twenty

For the second time in twenty minutes the lights went out in the Chamber of Myth.

“What now?” growled Cyrus.

“I… don’t know,” said Hecate.

“It’s that woman,” said Otto.

“No. There’s no bypass in here for the security lights. They’d have to be turned off from the security office. Your men must have done this.”

“No,” insisted Otto. “They are under strict orders to leave all systems in operation.”

“Why?” Hecate asked, then answered her own question. “Oh… you need a working computer terminal for your device.”

“Why don’t you say that a little louder?” said Otto icily. “Just in case the female agent didn’t hear you.”

Hecate ignored him. Instead she said, “Listen… can you hear the blowers?”

They were all silent in the absolute darkness. “I can’t hear anything except a few birds,” said Cyrus.

“Damn it! The blowers are offline.” Her voice was shrill with tension. “They’re on a dedicated system with their own generator. The controls for that are in my office.” She paused. “That means the main power is out as well as the security systems and auxiliary systems. All at once?”

Cyrus opened his cell phone. There was no light.

“Otto, try your phone. See if the light comes on.”

“It’s dead.”

“Something took out all electronics in a single burst,” said Cyrus, his voice low. “Either the island has been nuked or someone hit us with a precise EMP.”

“Our teams don’t have anything like that,” said Otto.

“Then the Americans are on the island. If they used an E-bomb, then they know about the trigger device. Nothing else makes sense.”

There was a distinct note of panic in his voice.

“We have to get out of here,” said Otto in an urgent whisper. He fumbled in the dark until he found Hecate’s arm and gave it a fierce squeeze. “We need to get out of here before they can stop us or we will have lost everything we’ve worked for.”

“I have a ruggedized laptop in my office,” she said. “It can withstand any kind of EMP and it’s in a lead-lined safe along with a portable hard drive with our backup files.”

“But how can we get to your office?” demanded Cyrus. “We’re trapped in here.”

Hecate laughed, a strangely feline sound in the darkness.

“I designed this place, Father. Do you think I would be so careless as to let it be my tomb?”

“Then get us out of here.”

“I need to find the waterfall. The rear panel is false. There’s a door that leads to a service tunnel. Now be quiet and let me get my bearings.”

Conrad Veder took the darkness philosophically. He wasn’t frustrated, because he was not emotionally invested in the kill. All it meant was that the change in circumstances required a new plan.

He remembered the process of climbing up to the ledge and climbing back down would be easy enough. But he didn’t move right away. There was no immediate threat to him up here and the lights might come back on.

One of the greatest advantages of having a mind like an insect is that there is no tendency toward impatience.

Tonton did not like the total darkness. It was the only thing that made him feel vulnerable.

He could still smell the woman and if he was careful he could track her. But what if she had night-vision goggles? How was she dressed? Fatigue pants and boots, a black tank top.

Did she have an equipment belt?

He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure.

A few seconds passed.

No, he decided. She hadn’t been wearing an equipment belt. On the other hand, she may have had a pack and left it among the foliage. He hadn’t seen her after she’d run into the brush. She might have had time to grab a pack and keep going.

So what did he do?

If he had one of the new recruits he’d have ordered him to stand up and then he’d see if the bitch put a bullet through his head. Tonton was not willing to risk his own head.

Miss Jakoby might have a trick. Tonton reached into his pocket for his cell, but the unit was dead. Not even a glow from the screen. What the hell?

Wracked with indecision, Tonton did nothing.

Grace Courtland did not fear the darkness. She would have preferred night vision or some useful light, but she didn’t need it. There was too much of the predator in her to be stymied by darkness.

If she couldn’t see, then neither of the men who were hunting her could see, either. And she understood the why of the darkness. Church had dropped the EMP, which meant that she had a little breathing room. But she also had a very specific purpose. There might be a hardened terminal or laptop on the island. She doubted there was one in this chamber, but that meant that she had to prevent Cyrus Jakoby from getting out of the chamber.

Her Special Forces training ran deep. Grace had been one of the very first women accepted into the SAS, and she’d been the first field team operator for Barrier. Church hadn’t recruited her for the DMS because she was decorative. Church wanted her because she was the best of the best. Now was the time to live up to that, and in the absolute darkness Grace smiled.

If anyone had seen that smile — even a killer like Tonton — it would have given him pause.

She moved out of her niche, recounting the steps she’d taken. Her training taught her to remember directions, yards run, right and left turns, elevation. This wasn’t a time for gunplay. She couldn’t see a target, and the muzzle flash from a missed shot would give her position away. The gun went back into her waistband and she practiced drawing the fighting knife from her right-hand pocket several times until she knew that she could have it out and flick the blade into the locked position in under a second.

That gave her the confidence to keep her hands free while she retraced her steps. She paused briefly to feel along the ground for small rocks, and she put several of them into her left pocket.

Somewhere off to her three o’clock position she could hear the whispered voices of Cyrus, Hecate, and Otto. Their position sounded about right for where she thought she needed to go.

Her greatest care was in placing her feet, making sure that each step was featherlight until she was sure of her footing, and then she shifted weight in a flow from one leg to the other. It was like using Tai Chi to stalk her prey in the darkness — long, slow, controlled steps.

Tonton thought he heard something and he turned his head and sniffed at the darkness. The air was thick with the scent of fear from several of the transgenic animals that had panicked when the lights went out. It clouded his sense of smell, but he was sure that he’d just caught a fresh whiff of the woman. Humans don’t smell like animals, and though Tonton did not possess the genes necessary for processing the thousands of individual scents that jungle apes had, he had trained for many hours to hone his olfactory skills.

He was sure that it was the woman. She’d moved.

There was a sudden sound far off to his opposite side and he turned suddenly, swinging his pistol around to point at the blackness. What had made the noise? The woman? Veder? One of the animals?

There was a second sound. Sharp and fast, like a stone dislodged by a running foot.

Then a third. All off to his right side.

It had to be her. Somehow she’d tricked him and was crossing the open field under cover of darkness instead of coming back along this path.

“Got you, bitch,” he said with quiet malice as he rose from a prone position and got to his feet. He took a tentative step, then another.

And then something brushed against his leg and he spun, but as he spun he felt his thigh ignite with a white-hot burn. He smelled a confusion of scents. The woman — close! — and then the sharp, coppery tang of blood.

He swung a vicious a blow through the shadows, but all he hit was air.

There was another flash of burning pain across the back of his knee and suddenly he found himself tilting to that side, his knee buckling.

Tonton cried out as pain hit him in waves, a one-two burst of agony from thigh and knee. He scrabbled at his thigh and could feel wetness, and then he felt something hot splash against his palm. He was bleeding. Fast and hard. An artery.

The bitch had cut him!

She’d found him in the dark and cut him.

“You fucking cu—!” he started to shout, but he was struck across the face. His cheeks burned with unbearable pain, and when he touched his face he could feel something weird, something terribly wrong. His mouth seemed to stretch wide… absurdly wide. Where the corners of his mouth should be were two ragged double lines of torn flesh.

He flailed at the darkness as fear burst through him like fireworks. Then he felt fingers curl into a knot in his hair and his head was jerked violently backward. Then there was the hard edge of a blade against his throat. It pressed deep but did not cut.

Something brushed his ear and he realized it was a pair of soft lips.

“This is for those poor bastards in Deep Iron,” the woman said in a murmur that was as soft as a whisper of passion.

He didn’t understand. He hadn’t been at Deep Iron. That job had been done by two of his men. He hadn’t killed those people. He opened his mouth to tell her, to plead with her. Then there was a lava-hot line across his throat and he had no voice at all. Tonton heard a weak and distant gurgle that sounded like it came from underwater. He felt hot wetness in his mouth, and then he was falling forward into a darkness more complete and eternal than the temporary shadows of the Chamber of Myth.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-One

If there were more of the scorpion-dogs down in the lower level we didn’t encounter them. We did find a half-dozen guys in greasy overalls lying dead inside a shattered office. It looked like they’d tried to make a stand against the monsters by pushing a desk against the door and arming themselves with wrenches. They’d killed one of the transgenic creatures by smashing in its skull, but from the looks of the place the other monsters had swarmed in. The workers looked to have been stung dozens of times each.

“Poor bastards,” Bunny said.

“Poor bastards who work for the bad guys,” I said. My sympathy level was bottoming out.

We ran on, chasing our flashlight beams. The EMP had wiped out our night vision, but we each had a flashlight and extra batteries wrapped in lead foil for this purpose.

“Stairs!” Bunny said, pointing, and we cut right and went through the doorway as fast as safety would allow. The stairwell was empty, so we climbed, taking turns covering each other on the corners, never stopping. If Alpha Team still held the far end of the hall, then I was hoping to catch the Russians by surprise. A few flash bangs and then some frags would make the odds more even. They would literally be in the dark, so we’d use that against them.

We got to the main floor and opened the door cautiously. No sounds of gunfire from inside the building. No way to tell if that was good news or bad. I could hear sounds of a pretty heated exchange outside, though.

This next part would be tricky because we couldn’t risk using our flashlight, but we had to get down that hallway.

I leaned close to Bunny and told him what I wanted to do.

“Roger that,” he whispered.

I slung my rifle and drew my Beretta. Moving carefully, I found the far wall with my left hand; Bunny kept one hand on my shoulder. Like a couple of blind beggars negotiating an alley we walked forward. I let my fingers glide along the wall and never moved faster than my ability to recognize the terrain. Each time I found an opening — a hallway or a doorway — I stopped, tapped Bunny’s hand twice, and then moved in a shuffle until my fingers made contact once more with the long, curving wall. Being in total darkness makes you realize how much of every action relies on sight. Sudden darkness for a sighted person opens up a feeling of great vulnerability. Movement is clumsy and slow. To overcome this you have to create a system of movement and constant analysis. Speed is an enemy to sightless orientation.

So, it took us a while to navigate that hallway, but the way we did it brought us all the way to the main doorway. The big glass doors were closed, so I followed them to the other side and found the wall again. Now I knew where we were and how far from the hatch.

We went another forty yards and then stopped. I found Bunny’s hand, tapped it three times — a cue that I was about to give instructions — and then followed his hand up his arm to his chest and then to the grenades hung on his battle rig. Then I found his big hand and drew a series of letters in his palm. He tapped my wrist every time he needed me to repeat one.

When I was done he gave my wrist two sets of two taps. Message received and understood.

We reoriented ourselves and moved farther along the hall until we could hear voices. Whispers from several men. Low, quiet, and in Russian. I could make out what they were saying, but there wasn’t time to translate for Bunny. Besides, none of it was tactically important. One man asked another when the lights were coming back on, and a gruff voice — probably a sergeant or team leader — told him to shut the hell up.

I holstered my pistol and took two grenades from my harness. A flash bang in my left and a fragmentation grenade in my right. From the faint rustle I knew Bunny was doing the same.

“Light ’em up!” I hissed, and we pulled the pins on the flash bangs.

If the Russians heard me, it didn’t matter. We sailed the grenades into the emptiness in front of us, squeezed our eyes shut, and covered our ears the best we could. Even so, the blast and starburst was like a hot knife through the brain.

It was far worse for the Russians.

The grenades burst in the air right above them and I opened my eyes a second after the detonation. I saw them — maybe twenty in all — reeling back from the intense light, screaming at the pain in their ears, too shocked and confused to do anything. The last sparks of the flash gave Bunny and me perfect distance and angle.

“Frag out!”

We threw.

They died.

Not all of them. We had to shoot three of them.

But the rest took the shrapnel full in the face. The fools had been spooked by the dark and had grouped together for safety. It had been a stupid mistake, but they probably thought they owned this hallway.

Now it was their tomb.

The echo of the blast rolled up and down the hallway, and my head rang from the thunder. Even pressing your hands to your ears can only block out a portion of that noise.

I turned on my flashlight and swept the beam over the charnel house.

“God Almighty,” said Bunny.

I cupped a hand around my mouth.

“Hopscotch!” I yelled.

A moment later the reply echoed back to us.

“Jump rope!”

It was Redman. Alpha Team had survived.

We converged on the hatch. We pulled chemical light sticks and threw them down so that we all met in a mingled blue and green glow. One of the Alphas came last, supporting Top, who looked ashy and ill.

“How you holding up?” asked Bunny, hurrying over to help.

“Just fucking peachy, Farmboy. Took you long enough.”

“Yeah, we stopped at a titty bar for a few beers.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Redman closed on me while I was examining the hatch. “First Sergeant Sims won’t accept any painkillers. He threatened to kneecap the first son of a bitch who tried to give him morphine.”

“He seems to be in that kind of mood. Leave him alone. We have other fish to fry. We need to get through this hatch.”

Before he’d been promoted to Grace’s number two, Redman had been the demolitions expert for Alpha. He ran his hand over the hatch and then crabbed sideways and knocked on the wall.

“Okay, Cap,” he said, “we couldn’t blow that hatch with an RPG, but the wall is just block. If we can knock a big hole in it, I can rig a compressed charge and maybe make us a doorway. We have just about enough C4 for that; it’s the hole that’s going to be the problem.”

“I need solutions, not problems.”

Redman looked at the dead Russians, then turned to one of the Alphas. “Beth — check the bodies. I need grenades and explosives. If they have any, it’ll be Semtex. Detonators, too. Whoever has the most Semtex will have the detonators. Do it now.”

Alpha Team moved with a purpose, and in under two minutes Redman had twenty grenades and four tubes of plastic explosive. Three of the four Russian detonators had been broken, but he said he only needed one.

He set to work rigging the grenades together over a wad made from half of the Semtex. He draped it with three layers of Hu’s polymer blast dampening cloth, placed the detonator with great care, and started backing up, unspooling wire as he went. I chased everyone back to the sharp bend in the corridor and we all flattened out on the floor by the wall.

“Fire in the hole!” Redman called, and clicked the detonator.

The blast was massive. Smoke and dust blew over us, funneling around the curved corridor.

As soon as it was clear, I was up and running, a cloth pressed to my face, squinting through the smoke. There was a smoking crater in the wall that was at least eight inches deep, and fissures ran outward from side to side and floor to ceiling.

“Damn,” Redman said, “I’m good.”

He set to work on the second part of the job, gouging the cracked inner stone to make a tight crevice for his C4. He packed it tight. A compressed blast does far more damage, and we needed damage. We needed a doorway big enough for me to climb through.

Once he was done we repeated our retreat and he clicked the detonator.

This blast was bigger but not louder. A lot of the force went into the stone wall with such intensity that we felt the vibration run along the floor.

Again I was up and running, and as I approached the wall I knew that Redman had broken through. I could feel a breeze of moist heat coming at me through the smoke. I waved furiously at the cloud of dust and shined my light at the hole.

It went all the way through.

But it wasn’t big enough.

Not for me. Not for any of us.

And we’d used all of our explosives.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Two

Grace moved away from the corpse of the Berserker and retraced her steps to the path. Ahead of her in the darkness she could hear the whispered conversation of Hecate and her father. It was no longer stationary. Grace crouched and listened, tracking the sound even though she couldn’t make out the words. The sound moved from left to right in front of her. There were no points of reference to guess distance, especially with whispers, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty yards.

What was to the right?

The sound told her. The soft hiss of the waterfall. That’s where Hecate was going. She remembered that metal panel in the back. A door or access panel. Grace was willing to bet a lot on it being a door.

She adjusted her course, feeling ahead for the terrain. She found a line of small rocks and recognized them as stones that lined the path used by the groundskeeping staff. Perfect.

“—give me a second—”

It was a snatch of a comment and Grace froze. Whoever said it couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet in front of her. She drew her pistol and listened.

“—here it is!” whispered Hecate. “There’s a release right under the—”

Grace fired in the direction of the voice. She knew that her first shot would probably miss, but the muzzle flash would show her where to put the second shot.

After the absolute darkness the flash was eye-hurtingly bright, but it froze a picture in her mind. The back of the waterfall. Hecate reaching up under the overhang of moss, her lithe body stretching. Cyrus behind her, his fist clutched around something that hung from a lanyard around his neck. Otto Wirths in the foreground, bent in the direction of the panel.

A flash image. There and gone.

Grace smiled and squeezed off five more shots.

She heard a scream.

And then the wall five feet to her right exploded, showering her with debris. A chunk of rock the size of a fist struck her on the side of her shoulder, and her last shot was high and wide.

Grace fell over and her gun vanished into the darkness.

A moment later Hecate slammed into her, snarling and spitting with insane rage, grabbing her arms with insane strength.

“You fucking bitch!” snarled Hecate as she drove Grace Courtland into the dirt. They rolled over and over again through the darkness, tumbling sideways down the hill away from the waterfall, colliding with rocks and smashing through plants. Hecate snarled continuously and Grace could feel hot spittle on her face and throat. The woman was enormously strong, her fingers like iron bands crushing into Grace’s arms with enough force to crush skin and muscle.

Grace jammed a forearm under Hecate’s chin to keep those sharp white teeth away from her throat. With her other hand she shoved back on the woman’s shoulder, trying to create space. Grace twisted to bring her knee up between them, using the long thighbone as a strut to separate them.

What the hell was she fighting? Had this mad bitch used her own genetic science on herself? Everything about Hecate provoked an image of one of the big fighting cats. Hecate even hissed like a panther.

Hecate suddenly let go of Grace’s arms and grabbed her throat. It was like being crushed by a vise. All at once Grace was unable to breathe.

Grace stopped pushing on Hecate’s shoulder and immediately hit her in the face — once, twice, again, pounding on the side of Hecate’s cheek and eye socket. The pressure eased by a tiny fraction. Grace dragged in a spoonful of air, but then Hecate tightened her grip, overlapping her thumbs to try to crush the windpipe. Grace pressed her chin down on the thumbs, forcing them against her sternum to slow the choke while continuing to hammer at Hecate. She cupped her palm and slapped Hecate over the ear.

Instantly Hecate howled in pain and toppled sideways. Grace pivoted on the floor and kicked out with both feet, catching Hecate on the hip and stomach, driving her farther away. Grace didn’t want to escape; she needed to breathe and reorganize. She spun around and came up into a crouch.

Otto Wirths tore away the decorative vegetation and ran his hands over the panel. The moss had hidden four wing nuts and Otto grabbed the first one and tried to twist it. It resisted and he growled in fury and frustration — and then it moved. He spun it around and around until it reached the end of the thread and fell away.

“Hurry!” Cyrus urged. “They’re breaking through the wall.”

“I am hurrying, damn it.” Otto attacked the second one, which was stuck just as firmly as the first. “What about Hecate?”

Cyrus was invisible beside him. He said, “She’ll catch up.”

The second wing nut began to turn. “And if she doesn’t?”

“We have a large family, Otto.”

Otto dropped the second wing nut and began turning the third. That one was looser and it yielded immediately. The fourth was harder, but he threw all of his strength at it and the nut turned.

“Otto…,” Cyrus hissed. “I hear something…”

There was a second and much bigger explosion and debris flew outward into the chamber. A jagged piece of stone whistled through the air and struck Grace on the side of the head and she spun and fell facedown on the grass and did not move.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Three

The moment I leaned close to the hole in the wall I heard a male voice yell, “They’re breaking through! Get us out!…”

A second male voice yelled, “Hecate… did you kill that bitch?”

“I don’t know,” a woman snarled from the darkness deeper in the chamber. “Otto, get my father out of here. Up the stairs. My office. The gray case.”

“What about…?”

“I’ll make sure you’re not followed. Go!”

Christ.

I could tell Grace was in trouble. Maybe dead. But the Jakobys were about to escape. There was no way for me to know whether a distraction at this moment would help or hurt. If Grace was still alive and hiding, then I could get her killed. On the other hand, I needed to know what the Jakobys were doing.

Grace’s own voice echoed in my mind.

The mission comes first.

I knew what the mission required. I put the flashlight and the muzzle of the Berretta into the hole, which gave me only a few inches of extra space to see. I prayed I was making the right move.

I switched the flashlight on and pointed the beam in the direction of the male voices. The woman had told Otto to get her father out of there. Cyrus was the one with the trigger device.

The flashlight beam swept over tropical foliage of all kinds and for a moment I saw nothing else; then I caught a momentary image of something at the edge of the beam of light. I immediately angled the beam back and saw a vulture-faced old man squinting at me through the glare. He held a piece of flat metal in his hands that he had obviously just lifted out of a rectangular hole in the wall. I fired at him and the first bullet hit the metal plate at an angle and whanged off into the darkness. I fired again as the man dropped the plate and tackled a second man who stood closer to the opening. Was that Otto and Cyrus Jakoby? It had to be. I fired and fired, sure that I hit at least one of them, but the tackle had sent them spilling into the opening. I fired the entire magazine and then tore the M4 from Bunny’s hand, jammed it into the opening, and let it rip. I wanted to fill their bolt-hole with ricochets that would chop those maniacs to pieces.

I thrust the gun at Bunny to reload and I swept back and forth with the flashlight.

“Hopscotch!” I bellowed.

But if Grace heard my call, she was not able to shout back the countersign.

My heart sank in my chest.

I spun and grabbed Redman by the shoulder. “The DMS and SEALs are all over this island. Find them. Get all the C4 you can and blow me a fucking hole. Bunny — I’m going back to the stairs and see if I can find Hecate’s office. Cyrus and Otto are on their way upstairs. Hecate said something about a gray case—”

“Shit… you think she has a ruggedized laptop?”

“Yeah, dammit, that’s exactly what I think. I’ve got to find that office.”

“I’m going with you.”

“No… Redman’s going to need muscle to fight through to our teams outside. We need that hole. As soon as he’s secured, then come find me.”

He wanted to protest, but I was already in motion.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Four

It was the blood that woke Grace Courtland. It seeped from the gash in her scalp and curled in lines over her cheek and into her nose. She choked and the sudden spasm of a cough brought her out of her daze. She rolled over onto her stomach and coughed the blood out of her nose and mouth. Her head felt like it was ten times normal sized and stuffed with broken glass. Nausea was a polluted wind that blew through her stomach.

There was movement, noise, and light off to her right and she turned her muzzy head to try to make sense of it. Colored lights popped on and flew through the air and in her confusion Grace didn’t understand what she was seeing, and then clarity returned to her. There was a hole in the wall to the Chamber of Myth and someone was tossing chemical light sticks inside. The Jakobys wouldn’t do something like that. It had to be…

“Joe!” she called, but her voice was a hoarse croak.

Grace climbed shakily to her feet. Her gun was lost somewhere in the shadows. There was no sign of Hecate or the others.

“Effing hell!” she growled, and began climbing back up the hill toward the waterfall and the hole in the wall. Her feet were unsteady and from the dizziness she felt Grace knew that she had a concussion. It was hard to think, but she forced herself to remember where she was and what she had to do.

When she was ten feet from the hole she called out.

“Hopscotch!”

There was a pause and then a familiar voice called back, “Jump rope! Major… is that you?”

“Beth… thank God…” Grace stumbled the last few steps and leaned on the wall. She saw Beth’s eyes go wide and realized what a mess she must look. Her face was covered with blood.

“Beth… what happened? Where did the Jakobys go? Where’s—”

Staff Sgt. Beth Howell, Alpha Team’s number two, gave it to her in a few quick sentences.

Grace turned and reached for Beth’s flashlight and shined it on the back of the waterfall, saw the open portal.

“Damn it.”

“Give me a flashlight and your sidearm,” she ordered, and Beth passed them through along with a spare magazine.

“It’s the last one I have.”

“If Captain Ledger or anyone else gets in touch, tell them I’m following the Jakobys.”

“Major — Captain Ledger took the stairs. He’s trying to find the Jakoby woman’s office, too.”

“Then I’d better bloody well beat him to it. Can’t let Echo Team take all the glory.”

Beth smiled, but she looked as stressed and nervous as Grace felt.

“Good hunting!” Beth called.

Grace said nothing. She racked the slide on the Sig Sauer, laid her pistol arm across the wrist of the hand holding the flashlight, and stepped through the opening. In her mind this wasn’t a simple hunt. The bloody Jakobys weren’t the only ones capable of extermination.

The stairs led upward into the darkness.

Gun in hand, Grace began climbing.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five

I pushed through into the stairwell, cleared it, and then began climbing. There were two floors above the main level, and I would have to check them both. My heart was racing and my nerves were screaming at me. Images of Grace, alone and hurt in the dark, kept trying to climb into my head and I kept forcing them out.

The mission comes first.

The pressure I felt was almost unbearable because the cost of failure was too high to calculate. Global ethnic genocide. How is that concept even possible for a human mind to grasp, let alone attempt to undertake? Even if someone was a racist, the concept should be so alien to the mind that it would never form, and yet these maniacs were within minutes of setting it into motion. Evil should never be allowed to flourish, but this transcended evil. I don’t know if there’s even a word for what this was.

That’s what put the power in my muscles; that’s what gave me focus.

At the first landing I pushed the door open slowly and quietly. The hall was dark as pitch. I risked my flashlight, casting the beam up and down, and then shut it off and shifted quickly away from where I’d been standing.

No shots tore through the doorway.

So far, so good.

I turned the light back on and moved down the hallway at a light run. Seventy feet in I found a body. It was a Russian and even from ten feet away I could tell there was something wrong about him, but it wasn’t until I was right on top of him that I could see that he had no arms. They had been ripped out of their sockets.

A second man lay against a wall a few yards away, and from the damage done to him and the smears of blood it looked like someone had beaten him to death with…

Holy shit.

Someone had torn the first Russian’s arms off and used them to beat the second man to death. As soon as I understood it, I knew that it had to be—

Something hit me in the side hard enough to pick me up off the ground and send me crashing into the wall. My gun and flashlight went flying. I hit, dropped, and rolled away, and if I hadn’t then a booted foot would have crushed my skull.

I scuttled backward as something huge and monstrous rushed at me from the shadows. It was roughly man shaped but way too big.

One of the Jakoby Twins’ transgenic soldiers. A three-hundred-pound killing machine with the face of an ape and a chest twice as massive as Bunny’s.

The soldier raised his foot to take another stamp and I swept his standing leg. He crashed with a sound like a clap of thunder, and I side-rolled back to my feet. My gun was on the floor fifteen feet away and I started to dive for it, but the ape-man grabbed my ankle and tripped me. As I fell he clawed at me with his other hand and grabbed a strap of my Kevlar.

I rolled sideways toward him and chopped him across the face with an elbow smash that cracked bone. It knocked his head back against the marble floor, and I pivoted on my back to bring my legs to bear and ax-kicked him on the mouth. The heel of my boot smashed in his front teeth and suddenly he was choking and gagging on bone fragments.

I got to my feet and drew my Rapid Response knife. I’m not one of those idiots who wait for their opponent to get back to his feet so there can be a round two. I threw myself at him and buried the knife into his eye socket. Then I cut his throat because I was having a bad fucking day.

Blood geysered up and splashed my face and arm. Screw it.

I got to my feet just as a second Berserker came running at me out of the shadows.

A gun would have been so much easier, but there was no time.

As he closed on me there was a moment when he passed through the flashlight’s glow and I realized that Bunny had been right and Top wrong when assessing the two men we’d fought in Deep Iron. These weren’t exoskeletons. Bunny had simply used fists against something so damn big and strong that his blows did little useful harm.

We’d all been right, though, about the body armor. These guys were dressed head to toe in it. I doubted that it was anything cutting-edge that stopped the PSI of bullets. These guys just bulled through it. It wasn’t that they were big — if they had ape DNA, then they were also much stronger and with far denser muscle tissue.

This passed through my mind in a microsecond. While those pieces were clicking into place I was moving forward to meet the brute.

He tried for a grab, but I figured him for something like that, so I dropped into a low crouch and drove the knife into the top of his foot and then slammed my shoulder into his crotch. He howled in surprise and pain and instinctively shoved at me. I kept a solid grip on the knife and yanked it free as his shove sent me skidding ten feet down the hall. At the end of the skid I brought my knees up and tucked into a backroll, so I ended up on my feet right next to the Russian’s dismembered arm.

The Berserker took a step and his foot buckled. I scooped up the Russian’s arm and threw it at the ape-man and as he batted it aside I was already moving forward. I slashed him from eyebrow to jawline in a hard diagonal slice that cut right through his nose. He shrieked in pain and clamped both hands to his face. In the narrow gap between his forearms I lunged in and stabbed him in the throat, gave the blade a quarter turn, and tore it free.

He fell.

I picked up my pistol and slapped my pockets for magazines, found that I had one plus what was in the Beretta.

It would have to do.

I wiped and folded the knife, picked up the flashlight, checked the action on the pistol, and ran like hell.

I got to the end of the hallway without finding a single room that looked like an office. There were workrooms and a lunchroom and some computer labs but nothing else. Shit. At the far end I found a stairwell and crashed through. Hecate’s office had to be on the top floor.

I was halfway up the stairs when I heard men shouting and screaming and firing. Flashlight beams cut back and forth and I risked a glance over the edge of the stairs. Two flights below, a group of Russians were fighting a losing battle against a pack of the scorpion-dogs.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, and ran upward. If I’d had a grenade left I’d have sent it down as a “hello” from Uncle Sam. Pity.

I took the steps two at a time and then came out onto the top level. My flash showed a much more elegant hallway, with brass fittings, expensive art on the walls, and a décor that tended toward style rather than function. Hecate’s office had to be here, but as I shone the light down the hall I could see at least twenty office doors.

My flashlight also swept across the simian faces of a half dozen of the Berserkers.

They saw me and grinned.

And then they rushed me.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Six

The spiral staircase that rose from the Chamber of Myth to Hecate’s office was one of several bolt-holes she’d built into the architecture. Paris knew about most of them but not all. Paris had been unaware of this one and of one other that took Hecate down to a pneumatic tube in which she could take a capsule from the main building straight to the dock. There was a seaplane and a twenty-eight-foot ZT-28 °Checkmate speedboat with 496-horsepower engine and a top speed of 74 miles per hour. A final private stairway led to a small lab she had ordered built during one of Paris’s trips to the South of France. It was in that private lab that Hecate had worked with panther and tiger genomes for some personal gene therapy.

In lighter moods Hecate sometimes castigated herself for wasting the time and resources on the bolt-holes and for the paranoia that led her to create them. Now, as she followed Otto and Cyrus up through the dark, she felt a flush of vindication.

“I can’t see a damn thing,” growled Cyrus from above her.

“You don’t need to see,” she snapped. “Just climb.”

“Wait… the ladder stopped… I can feel a door.”

“That’s it. It opens into a closet in my office.”

One by one they emerged from the spiral staircase into a closet that was as dark as everything else. Hecate felt her way past Otto and Cyrus to the door and let herself into her office. The room felt alien now that there were no points of reference, but she finally located her desk and from there oriented herself to the whole room. A few brief diffused flashes of light backlit the blinds, and Hecate moved to the window and peeked out.

“God! Look at this.”

With the blind lifted even a bit, the flashes of automatic gunfire and explosions gave them enough light to cross the room to join her. They peered out. The lawn below was a battlefield. On one side were at least sixty of the remaining Russians. They had a very secure firing position among a tumble of decorative boulders. Well to their left were the guards from the Dragon Factory — normal humans and the genetically modified Berserkers. Neither of these two forces was firing at the other. Though there had been no opportunity for either Hecate or Cyrus to tell their forces to stand down, that the conflict between the two houses of Jakoby — the Deck and the Dragon Factory — was over, they had somehow worked out a temporary alliance against a common threat. The other side of the lawn was crammed with armed men. It was impossible to pick out any details from that distance, but the precision and tactics they observed told the tale. These were U.S. Special Forces. A lot of them.

Between the two opposing sides lay the burning wreckage of a Black Hawk helicopter. Whether it had been shot down by their own men or had crashed because of systems failure following the EMP was anyone’s guess. The lawn was littered from end to end with bodies.

“This isn’t a fight we can win,” said Hecate.

“Where is the rest of your staff?” Otto asked.

“If they followed procedure then they’re down in the caves below the maintenance level. They are instructed to remain there until they get an all-clear signal.” In the dim light she gave a rueful smile. “Of course, if they made it to the caves and locked themselves in before the EMP, then that could be a problem. The computers control all life support.”

Cyrus turned to his daughter.

“Listen to me, Hecate… I cannot express how deeply your loyalty touches me. I would love to spend years and years working with you, side by side, to help reshape this world as the Extinction Wave cleanses it. But…” He nodded to the battle outside. “I can’t see how we can get away from here.”

“I have a boat. And a seaplane.”

“And we’ve had an EMP,” he reminded her.

Hecate closed her eyes. “Shit.”

“We’re not getting out of here,” said Cyrus. “I think we can all agree on that.”

Otto opened his mouth to say something, then sighed and nodded.

“We can try,” insisted Hecate. “We can’t just roll over and let them win.”

“Win?” said Cyrus with a smile. “What makes you think they can win? The most they can do is kill us.”

“But…”

He fished into his shirt and brought out the trigger device.

“In war people die,” he said. “All that matters is winning. Now, my pet, let’s get that laptop.”

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Seven

I raised my pistol and fired.

All of them were wearing body armor, and they were fast. It was head shots or I was dead. The Berserkers screamed like mountain gorillas — not a human sound at all.

I hit the lead one in the forehead and he pitched back and dragged two others down. I fired three more shots and took down another. Another two shots for a third.

Then they started shooting at me.

I jumped sideways and crashed through an office door, hit the ground, rolled, and came up into a kneeling firing position as they tried to squeeze through the doorway. The window blinds were open, and rippling light from the pitched battle outside gave me enough illumination to see the Berserkers. Their bulk was against them as they fought one another to be the first to get to me. I fired and hit the lead one in the throat, but he opened up with a Škorpion vz. 61 machine pistol that chewed up half the room. He was still firing when he fell down dead.

Another of the Berserkers reached over him and fired. I twisted out of the way of the first round, but the second and third slammed into me and sent me flying. I could actually feel my ribs break. The pain shot through me like lightning as I hit the wall and slid down.

But I used the pain; I let it wipe my mind to clarity. The Berserker stepped into the room and I shot him through the upper lip. The bullet punched through the back of his head and tore the ear off the Berserker behind him. I grinned and fired again. The one with the torn ear raised an arm to fend off the shot, and though the Kevlar deflected the round, I could tell from his howl of pain that the impact broke his arm. I didn’t much care. I put two rounds into him. And fired my last at the remaining Berserker before the slide locked back.

I dropped the magazine and pulled my last one. Just doing that sent daggers of pain through my side. Everything that had happened over the last hour had drained me, and the damaged ribs weren’t going to help. My head pounded from the noise of all the gunfire and I still hadn’t found Grace or the Jakobys.

The last Berserker was wounded, but he was still growling as he hauled on the corpses that choked the doorway. He yelled threats in Afrikaans and English and promised to tear my head off. I think he meant it.

I struggled to my feet and braced my butt against the desk to help steady my aim. The broken ribs were on my right side. My gun arm.

“Come on, you ugly bastard!” I yelled.

He grinned at me with bloody teeth and poked a rifle barrel into the room. I put four shots into him before he could squeeze the trigger. His head seemed to disintegrate as he flew backward.

I headed for the door, but on the first step I realized that there was something wrong with my left leg. When I’d fallen I must have twisted something. Swell. I sucked it up as best I could and limped to the door. The Berserkers were slumped everywhere and I had to climb over them to get back to the hallway.

My flashlight lay on the floor. Bending to pick it up was no fun at all with busted ribs.

There were still a lot of offices to check. I had to find them.

The first office was empty. So was the second. And the third.

Just as I was reaching for the doorknob on the fourth office, the door opened and a Berserker punched me in the face.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Eight

Hecate swore and punched the wall beside the safe.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Cyrus.

“I can’t see the numbers on the dial. Look in my desk drawers… find a lighter, anything!”

Otto and Cyrus began tearing apart her drawers, throwing papers and pens everywhere. “Matches!” cried Otto. “I found a pack of matches.”

Hecate crossed the room, navigating by the light from the battle. There was a scrape and a hiss and a small fire blazed at the end of a paper match. Cyrus snatched up a sheaf of reports and rolled them into a tube. Otto held the match to the roll, and as it caught, the glow flooded the room, pushing back the shadows.

Cyrus cried out in delight as if with all of the technology he and Otto had stolen or created, this simplest of man’s tools — fire — was the wonder of the ages. He and Otto hurried over to the wall and watched as Hecate attacked the dial once again. This time the tumblers clicked one-two-three and she jerked the door open.

The safe was large and there were stacks of papers, bundles of currency, cases of jewelry, and several high-capacity flash drives banded together with oversized rubber bands. One whole side of the safe was taken up by a large briefcase with a corrugated metal cover. It was very heavy and Hecate grunted as she pulled it out and they carried it over to the desk. Otto swept the last of the papers onto the floor as Hecate set the case down and unlocked it. She punched the on button and they all held their breath.

A tiny green light popped on and the screen flashed from black to blue.

“Thank God!” said Cyrus.

“Lead case in a lead-lined safe,” said Hecate. “My father taught me to be extra-careful.”

Cyrus looked up at her and there was such a depth of love in his eyes that Hecate felt her own eyes growing moist. She said, “I want us to survive this.”

“We can’t…”

“We can’t escape the island,” said Hecate. “But there are caves and tunnels all through this island. We may be able to find a place to hide until we can escape.”

“What are the chances?” said Otto with a calculating coldness.

“Slim. But that’s better than none.”

Otto studied her and then nodded. “Your father and I have faced longer odds.”

“Like when we faked my death in Brazil,” Cyrus said. “That was the first time one of the ‘Family’ had to be sacrificed for the cause.”

“What do you mean?”

“We drowned a clone and let his body be found. By then we were in Cabo and reading about it in the papers.”

The computer finished loading.

There was a sudden racket from outside. Yells and gunfire.

“They’re here!” Cyrus cried, but when Hecate ran to the door and looked out she shook her head.

“No… it looks like a single soldier.” She turned back, smiling. “I have a dozen Berserkers on this floor at all times. They’ll tear him apart. We have time.”

Cyrus dug the flash drive from under his shirt and lifted the lanyard over his head. He kissed it lovingly and handed it to Otto, who punched in the security code that activated the drive.

“How will we transmit?” asked Otto as he handed the drive to Hecate. “The EMP will have taken out your router.”

“Satellite uplink,” she said. She fitted the drive into a USB port and tapped a few keys. “The uplink’s built into the computer. We can hack three different Mexican satellites from here.” She turned the laptop around with the keys toward Cyrus.

“Good,” said Cyrus. “The next steps are critical. I have to upload the release codes and then transmit. The signal also sends an automatic verification sequence. Unless I hand-enter a cancel sequence, then the release codes are unscrambled when the Extinction Clock reaches zero.”

“When’s that?” asked Hecate, caught up in the sorcery of her father’s plan.

“Noon tomorrow.”

The gunfire in the hallway was punctuated by hoarse death screams. Hecate chewed her lip. The screams sounded more like Berserkers than ordinary men. More soldiers must have reached this floor.

“What if those soldiers break in here and take the trigger device?”

“Doubting the unstoppability of your transgenic toys?” Cyrus said with a smile.

“I don’t want to fail when we’re this close.”

“We won’t. Once this is sent, all we have to do is… nothing. Unless they know the cancel sequence it won’t matter.”

“I don’t even know it,” said Otto. “Mr. Cyrus is the only one who can stop it, and… why would he?”

“It’s all yours, Father,” she said. “Let’s change the world.”

“Let’s not,” said a female voice.

They whirled to see Grace Courtland standing in the doorway to the closet.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Nine

I went down and I almost went out.

The only thing that saved me was my injured leg. As soon as I saw the Berserker lunge at me I shifted backward and my bad leg buckled under me. He still nailed me, but it wasn’t full-power. It was enough, though, to knock me across the hallway and smash me into the far wall. My head felt like cracked church bells were ringing and fireworks burst in my eyes.

I heard the Berserker laugh.

He drew his sidearm as he came out of the office. I brought my gun up and fired over and over again, trying to aim through the haze and distortion filling my eyes. There’s an Army saying that if you put enough ordnance downrange you’re bound to hit something. I put half a magazine into the air where I thought his head should be.

He never returned fire.

I blinked my eyes clear and stared. The Berserker was leaning back against the door frame and he slowly… slowly sat down. His eyes were wide and filled with surprise, and there was a black dot above his right eyebrow.

I’d fired eight shots and hit him once.

Once was enough.

A voice inside my head said, Tick-tock.

I got to one knee. Then to my feet. My left leg felt like it was made from Silly Putty and a furnace had opened in my chest. My head was a bag of broken stones.

“Grace…,” I said.

I kept going down the hall. There was just one door left, and as I reached for the handle I heard shouts and then gunshots. I tried kicking the door open, but my bad leg collapsed under me and I fell.

“There!” someone yelled, and I turned to see more of the goddamn Berserkers pounding down the hallway toward me. I leaned against the office door, raised my pistol, and fired.

And then from the other side of the door I heard Grace Courtland scream.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty

For Grace Courtland it had all come down to this. A single moment in time when what she did and who she was would matter most.

She had climbed up through the long darkness of the access stairs and emerged into the darkness of the utility closet in Hecate’s office. She almost rushed straight out, but when she heard them talking about the trigger device she stopped to listen. She understood what had to be done.

“It’s all yours, Father,” said Hecate. “Let’s change the world.”

Grace stepped out and pointed her gun at Cyrus Jakoby’s face.

“Let’s not,” she said.

The three of them froze, in shock, but their eyes were filled with sudden and immeasurable hatred.

“Mein Gott!” cried Cyrus.

Grace fired.

Not at Otto, or Cyrus, or Hecate. She fired at the laptop. But the lead-shielded computer was too tough and the bullet ricocheted off to punch a hole through Cyrus’s left biceps. He screamed and fell back, clapping a hand over the bloody wound.

“No!” said Otto in a hoarse whisper.

He lunged for the keyboard and Grace shot him. The first bullet took Otto Wirths in the shoulder and spun him, and her second punched a wet hole in his chest. Otto crashed to the desk and then rolled off onto the floor, dragging the laptop with him.

And then Hecate threw herself at Grace. The albino woman leaped twelve feet across the office and drove Grace against the wall. With a snarl of inhuman rage Hecate bit down hard on Grace’s shoulder. Grace screamed and reeled back and she struck her already-injured head on the corner of the closet doorway. The pain was almost unbearable, but she clubbed Hecate with the butt of her pistol. The blow barely slowed the woman. Hecate snarled at Grace, her lips red with the blood that pumped from Grace’s torn shoulder. Grace hit her again and again, but Hecate backhanded her so hard that the world went white in the midst of all the blackness.

Grace hit the ground and her gun slid away from her. Hecate looked from Grace to the fallen pistol and was caught in a split second of indecision. Grace tried to focus her eyes, but there were two of everything. Even so she did not hesitate. He kicked hard and swept Hecate’s feet from under her, and as she fell Grace rolled sideways toward her gun. Hecate sprang into a catlike crouch and lunged again, but Grace had her gun now. She fired from point-blank range and the bullet tore through Hecate’s stomach.

“No!” cried Cyrus as his daughter was flung backward.

Grace struggled to her knees and pointed the gun at Cyrus.

“Step away from that fucking computer!” she ordered.

Someone began pounding on the office door and then came gunshots. Grace could not tell who it was — Special Forces, the Russians, the Berserkers — and she couldn’t risk it.

“Step away or I will kill you!” Grace yelled. Her head injury was making her sick, and the double vision was getting worse.

Cyrus hesitated. His eyes were wild, mouth open, drool beginning to drip from his lower lip.

“You can’t,” he implored. “This is everything I’ve worked for my whole life. This is the purpose of my life!”

“Move away from the keyboard…”

“You idiot… you’re white! What I’m doing will be the saving of the entire race. Don’t you understand that? This for the survival of the white race!”

Grace’s eyes narrowed to icy slits. Her hands were trembling, but her voice was firm. “And this is for the survival of the human race.”

She pulled the trigger.

There were two blasts.

The first caught Cyrus Jakoby high on the left side of his chest and spun him against the wall.

The second blast, which happened in almost the same instant, struck Grace Courtland in the back.

The impact threw her forward to the edge of the desk. She hit it hard and collapsed to her knees. Shocked beyond understanding, she turned and saw a shape emerge from the shadows of the closet.

Conrad Veder. He held his smoking pistol in his hand and raised the barrel to point at Grace’s head.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-One

I fired three shots, two at the Berserkers, hitting one of them in the head, and then I pointed the gun at the door and blew the lock off. I threw my shoulder against it and saw a sight that nearly tore the heart out of my chest.

Grace was on her knees, half-collapsed over the front of a big office desk. In the pale glow of a laptop screen I could see that she was covered in blood. Her face was painted red; her back was slick and wet. Hecate Jakoby was crawling slowly along the floor toward the desk and she, too, was bleeding. Otto Wirths lay dead on the floor, and Cyrus Jakoby was climbing back to his feet, blood streaming from his arm and chest.

And one person stood on his feet.

I knew him as Hans Brucker and Gunnar Haeckel. But those men were dead. This was an exact copy. Another clone. And he held a pistol in his hand.

“Joe…,” said Grace in a ragged whisper. “The code…”

The assassin shot her.

I think I screamed. I don’t remember. I could feel the gun buck in my hand. I saw the assassin duck backward into a closet, saw splinters rip loose from the doorjamb. I staggered into the room, screaming as Grace slid down to the floor.

I wheeled into the doorway of the closet, but it was empty. There was an open trapdoor in the floor and splashes of blood all around it. I’d hit him. But he was gone.

I spun back into the room and shot Cyrus Jakoby in the stomach. He fell backward and collapsed. Hecate stretched up a long arm from the floor toward the laptop. I shot her in the head. My slide locked back, my gun empty.

I could hear the Berserkers coming.

If I had any chance of saving Grace I had to do something. I looked wildly around. There was an adjoining office, and I stumbled to it. It was almost identical to Hecate’s. Probably her brother’s. I staggered back to Grace and pulled her to her feet. She was nearly unconscious. I grabbed the laptop with the other hand and somehow dragged us all into the next room. I eased Grace down into a chair and then rushed back, scooped her gun up off the floor as the Berserkers began crowding into the room. I shot the first one in the forehead, but I could see that there were more of them in the hallway.

I retreated to Paris’s office, slammed and locked the door. There was a security crossbar on the door and I dropped it in place. Almost immediately the Berserkers began pounding on the door. The whole frame shook. I knew it wouldn’t hold.

I staggered over to Grace. There was harsh white light coming in through the window. One of the soldiers outside had set off a flare. Gunfire was constant.

Grace was slumped in the chair. She had been shot twice in the back, and the exit wounds on her stomach and chest were dreadful. I tore off my Kevlar and ripped my shirt to rags to staunch the flow of blood. Her head lolled and for a horrible moment I thought she was gone, but when I pressed my fingers against her throat I could feel a pulse. It was weak, but it was there.

“Grace” I said, pitching my voice sharply enough to wake her from the stupor of shock. “Grace, stay with me, babe… come on… stay with me.”

She opened her eyes a little and licked her lips. “That’s… Major… Babe…,” she said with a smirk.

“Yes, it is, honey; yes, it is.”

The pounding on the door was incessant.

“Joe… the laptop…”

It was on the desk and I pulled it close. There were two words in a little gray box.

Message sent.

“Grace… did Cyrus send the code?”

“I — don’t…” Her voice disintegrated into a fit of coughing. Blood flecked her lips.

“Grace, honey, stay with me. Help’s on the way.”

I hoped to God that I wasn’t lying to her. I could hear helicopters in the air now, which meant that help was arriving from outside the EMP blast zone. Soon hundreds of troops would be landing. But was it all for nothing?

“Joe,” she whispered, “listen…” She reached up with a weak hand and gripped the front of my shirt, tried to pull me close. “Joe — if the… code… was sent… there’s…”

She broke off into another fit of coughing. I used another strip of cloth from my shirt to dab the blood from her lips. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do anything to get out of this room, to get her to a medic.

“… Joe… if the code was sent… there’s still time.”

“What do you mean, Grace? How can we stop it?”

“Cancel… code…” More coughing, more blood. “Cyrus knows. If not… MindReader…”

The Berserkers were knocking plaster out of the wall. The whole room shook.

“Take the flash drive… to Bug… tell him.” Her eyes drifted shut.

“Grace, come on… don’t do this to me. Don’t leave me…”

Her eyelids fluttered open. “I’ll… never leave you…”

But she did.

Her eyes closed and she settled against me. Her head lolled forward and she died right there with her cheek pressed against mine. I screamed her name. I screamed and screamed until I tore blood from my own throat.

But all the screams in the world could not bring her back from the infinite sea of darkness in which she now swam. I could actually feel her leave. It was like a whisper against my lips. Her last breath, exhaled as I held her.

I pulled her against my chest and rocked her back and forth as one by one all of the lights that held back my personal darkness flickered and went out.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Two

I crouched in the dark. I was bleeding and something inside was broken. Maybe something inside my head, too. Grace lay in my arms and yet she was gone.

I was gone, too.

Slowly, with infinite care and gentleness, I slid from the chair and laid her on the floor. I straightened her arms and legs, and I bent and kissed her forehead and eyes and her lips. For a long moment I knelt there with my head on her chest, praying that I could hear that noble and loving heart beat once more.

But all I heard was silence and the screaming madness that was boiling inside my own head. The door was barred, but the Berserkers were going to get in. I knew that.

I got to my feet. I had Grace’s gun. I released the magazine and checked the rounds. I had three bullets left. Three bullets and a knife.

The pounding on the door was like thunder. I knew the door wouldn’t hold.

They would get in.

The code had been sent. I pulled the flash drive from the computer and put it in my pocket. Somewhere the Extinction Clock was ticking down. If I was still in this room when it hit zero, more people would die than perished during the Black Death and all of the pandemics put together.

I thought I could stop them. We — me, Church, the DMS… Grace — we thought we could stop them.

Now it was down to me or no one. I had to get the flash drive to Bug, and I prayed that he and MindReader could read the codes on the drive and send whatever cancel signal could be sent. It might even be a fool’s errand. But Grace had died to get us this far, and with her last breaths she’d given me this task.

If there was any kind of justice in the universe, then a sacrifice so bravely made could not—should not—be in vain.

It wasn’t our fault we came into this so late. They chased us and messed with our heads and ran us around, and by the time we knew what we were up against the clock had already nearly run its course.

We tried. Over the last week I’d left a trail of bodies behind me from Denver, to Costa Rica, to the Bahamas. And now Grace Courtland was dead.

The pounding was louder. The door was buckling, the crossbar bending. It was only seconds before the lock or the hinges gave out, and then they’d come howling in here. Then it would be them against me.

I was hurt. I was bleeding.

I had three bullets and a knife.

I got to my feet and faced the door, my gun in my left hand, the knife in my right.

I smiled a killer’s smile.

Let them come.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Three

When the door burst open there were five of them.

I used three bullets and killed three of them. Head shots. I would like to think that some force steadied my hand. I don’t know. But I killed the first three through the door.

When the fourth one climbed over the bodies I met him with a knife to the throat. I stabbed him a dozen times. I was screaming. He was screaming, too, trying to back away. I crawled out after him and killed him.

The last of the Berserkers came at me and hit me. I felt my cheekbone break. I felt teeth buckle in their sockets. I don’t know what kept me on my feet. I don’t know what put the power in my arm to slash him across the throat. Over and over again.

I blacked out for a while, and when I could think again I was covered in blood and the Berserker was… ruined.

I staggered across the office to the desk and then shambled around it.

Cyrus Jakoby lay on the floor. He was bleeding from several gunshot wounds. All were serious. None were fatal. That was a shame. For him.

He looked up at me, at my face, into my eyes, and he saw something that tore a scream from him. Maybe it was in that moment that he recognized the implacable, heartless, relentless monster that his victims had always seen in him. Maybe he realized that he was tethered to life by only one slender thread.

He knew the cancel code.

He knew that I would not, could not, kill him as long as he had it.

He thought that he could bargain with that.

He should have looked deeper into my eyes.

I stood over him, covered in blood — some of which was Grace’s — and I showed him my knife.

I never had to ask him for the code.

In the end, he gave it willingly.

But not easily.